"Three centuries after Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, this gripping tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued, remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel. But the book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about entrenched attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized...

The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is the lesser-known sequel to Defoe's well-loved Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe is married in England when he is overcome by the melancholy urge to visit his island once more. After the death of his wife he sets sail and finds his island in a state of disarray. He installs a code of conduct and leaves the habitants with useful skills. He then sails home via Madagascar, South-East Asia and China and

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Years after being rescued from the deserted island, Robinson Crusoe's life is much different from the one he knew during his solitary years as a cast away-he has a loving wife, small children, and a successful career as a plantation owner. But, with echoes of his old adventures sounding in his head, Crusoe feels drawn back to his island, and when his nephew offers to take him on board his trading vessel, Crusoe cannot refuse the opportunity to return...

If ever the story of any private man's adventures in the world were worth making public, and were acceptable when published, the Editor of this account thinks this will be so. The wonders of this man's life exceed all that (he thinks) is to be found extant; the life of one man being scarce capable of a greater variety. The story is told with modesty, with seriousness, and with a religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always...