Social Issues in Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe contains references to two issues-racism and religion. Certainly, Crusoe’s attitudes toward Xury, his companion in slavery and his fellow fugitive, and toward Friday, his faithful servant, are typical of the seventeenth-century English condescension toward people of darker-skinned races. Crusoe clearly believes the white man to be superior to other races. Furthermore, Crusoe’s business ventures included slave trading. But Crusoe is very much a man of his time. His brand of bigotry is, for that earlier age, rather mild, tempered as it is by a sincere desire to do the right thing always. Thus it is that although Crusoe sells Xury to a Portuguese captain, he does so only because the captain has promised to give Xury his freedom after ten years.