This essay reappraises Defoe’s writings on economics to argue that the fascination of modern economists with Robinson Crusoe is either misplaced or ahistorical. Rather than an exemplary study of production and consumption, the novel is a one-off treatment of Crusoe’s debt – in the form of seeds, tools, and a rifle – to an absent, but paradoxically foundational, world of European trade. In his subsequent novels – The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and A New Voyage Round the World – Defoe abandons the idea of his heroes as economic lab rats and focuses instead on the fluid and uncertain world of international commerce. Despite the complexities of such trade, Defoe’s novels fictionalize a cultural belief that the unmapped spaces on the globe offer the prospect of what he calls ’infinite Advantage’: the belief that one can use resources indefinitely without using them up.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.

Two hundred years ago, in the early hours of the morning of 29 August 1816, William Pitt, Lord Amherst, unrested after travelling overnight, was apparently unceremoniously manhandled in an attempt to usher him physically with his two deputies, George Thomas Staunton and Henry Ellis, into the presence of the Jiaqing Emperor at the Summer Palace of Yuanming Yuan. Fatigued, separated from his diplomatic credentials and ambassadorial robes, Amherst and his deputies resisted, and left the palace in anger. It was reported to the emperor that Amherst's inability to attend was occasioned by illness, as was that of his two deputies. The emperor, discovering the ambassador was not ill, immediately dismissed the embassy without granting an imperial audience and rejected its ‘tribute’ of gifts. Amherst's party then began its long overland journey south to Canton (Guangzhou) where it embarked for home.

British accounts of the embassy lay its ostensible ‘failure’ to secure an audience not on the emperor, but on the scheming of senior court officials who had unwisely assured him that Amherst was preparing to perform the problematic ceremony of the full imperial koutou or ‘kowtow’ with its three kneelings accompanied by three knockings of the forehead for each prostration. After a process of negotiation Amherst instead offered to perform the compromised version of the ceremony that his more famous predecessor, Viscount George Macartney, had agreed to undertake for the Qianlong Emperor at Jehol in September 1793, kneeling on one knee and bowing his head thrice as he would before his royal master, George III. Indeed in an extension of the compromise the ambassador offered to perform this kneeling not once but three times with the full complement of nine bows of the head in total. The Qianlong Emperor had accepted a compromise in 1793; his fifth son and successor would not. The expensive items brought by the British as ‘presents’ for the Jiaqing Emperor, costing some £20,000, were not accepted, though afterwards, the emperor agreed to a very limited and symbolic exchange of a few items in his apparent recognition of the sincerity and obedience of the Prince Regent in sending this tribute. The embassy left Canton for home on 28 January 1817, suffering shipwreck and pirate attack on the return voyage, and visiting the deposed emperor Napoleon on St Helena (who told Amherst he was very foolish not to kowtow), arriving back in Britain on 17 August 1817.

On 10 April 1815, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, Mount Tambora exploded in the largest volcanic eruption in modern history. The force of the blast created a plume of aerosol sulfates, covering roughly nine million square kilometers, that reached the stratosphere and cooled temperatures in the northern hemisphere by approximately three degrees Centigrade for three years. In his recent study, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World, Gillen D’Arcy Wood documents Tambora's far-ranging effects in Switzerland, North America, Ireland, India and Yunnan Province in China: unseasonable cold, anomalous precipitation patterns, crop failures, famine, and millions of deaths worldwide from starvation and disease. As Wood demonstrates, Tambora created a worldwide climatological catastrophe that paradoxically went nearly unrecognized at the time; there were only a handful of first-hand reports about the eruption from British ships in the vicinity of the island, and only one eyewitness account by the Raja of Sanngar, whose kingdom on Sumbawa was buried under meters of pyroclastic lava flows and ash. Across the northern hemisphere, from Thomas Jefferson's estate in Virginia to the Swiss Alps, where Byron and the Shelleys spent a wet, cold, and miserable summer in 1816, commentators grimly noted devastatingly unseasonable cold, crop failures, and the impoverishment of peasants and small farmers who found themselves starving, even as grain prices soared. Yet without eyewitness reports of the eruption and without a modern scientific understanding of volcanology, writers across Eurasia and North America interpreted the Year without a Summer in moral terms: the cascading effects of Tambora were seen, at once, as political failures of regimes in power; as proof of the moral and socioeconomic corruption of entire societies; and as evidence of divine or heavenly retribution. Tambora emerged as a climatological phenomenon only with the development in the late twentieth century of tree ring and ice core analyses and sophisticated computer modeling. Therefore, as Wood suggests, the significance of this massive eruption for nineteenthcentury global history – and for our understanding of ‘future impacts of multidecadal climate change’ – only recently has begun to reshape how scientists and now humanists can study the wide-ranging ecological effects of the Year without a Summer.

By the time James Cook was killed in 1779 at Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island of Hawai'i, the Pacific Ocean had been mapped and remapped by dozens of fictional and non-fictional texts. Even before the news of his death reached England, popular accounts of Cook's first two voyages had begun to transform Polynesia into an idyllic realm of tropical beaches and exotic cultures or, more ominously, into a beleaguered paradise assaulted by merchants and missionaries. For readers before 1770, however, the Pacific was conceived as a mosaic of more-or-less distinct regions and spheres of influence that, in different ways, fulfilled three crucial, if imaginary, roles. First, the islands east of the Indonesian archipelago (and the imaginary continent of Terra Australis Incognita) offered the prospect of an insatiable market for European exports and an inexhaustible storehouse of gold, spices, and exotic goods; second, the civilizations of China and Japan offered the luxury goods (tea and porcelain) in demand across Europe and access to complex trading networks across East Asia that could multiply profits severalfold; and third, the west coast of the Americas stoked dreams of breaking the Spanish monopoly on gold and silver mining, disrupting Spanish trade across the Pacific, and blocking French designs to control the slave trade in the Caribbean and Central America.

As the first professional woman dramatist in England, Aphra Behn offers radically different perspectives from her male counterparts on the love intrigues, wit battles and property-mongering satire that are the stock-in-trade of Restoration social comedy. While most critics of the period now acknowledge that Behn was one of the most artistically and commercially successful playwrights of the 1670s and 1680s, the reasons for her success and, to some extent, the nature and significance of her achievement remain matters of debate. Some commentators argue that Behn champions women's right to choose their marriage partners, and consequently identify her as a seventeenth-century feminist; other scholars maintain that she offers a much darker condemnation of the antifeminism and male libertinism of her time; and still others emphasize the ambiguities of her position as a woman writer in a misogynistic society. There is, paradoxically, much to be said for all of these views: comedies such as The Rover (part one, 1677; part two 1681), Sir Patient Fancy (1678), The Feign'd Curtizans (1679), The City-Heiress (1682) and The Luckey Chance (1686) dramatize the allure (and difficulties) of women exercising their choices in love. Even as Behn criticizes the antifeminism endemic to a patrilineal society, she reminds her audiences that women have limited options and limited room to manoeuvre.

Since its own time, Restoration drama has been controversial, provoking radically different judgments about its aesthetic value and moral significance. Critical debates reach back at least as far as 1698 when the High Tory churchman, Jeremy Collier, published a scathing indictment of Restoration comedy for its immorality and contempt for authority; various defenders of the drama, including playwrights such as William Congreve, countered these charges by arguing that comedy satirizes vice and vanity to secure the socioeconomic stability premised on feminine virtue and masculine property rights. The terms of this controversy have persisted for three hundred years – Collier and his critical descendants argue that Restoration comedy is obscene, blasphemous, and heartless; its champions claim that it offers timeless insights into the human condition or tellingly satirizes the vices and follies of its era. If these responses to the drama often tell us more about their authors than about the plays themselves, they also describe a contentious history of efforts to domesticate a morally suspect theatre by assimilating Restoration comedy to larger critical and ideological paradigms.