KNOWN to millions, even those who have never read Daniel Defoe’s popular desert-island story, Robinson Crusoe has never failed to engage the interests of not only enthusiasts for tales of adventure but also literary critics, sociologists, economists and psychologists.

Widely recognised as the first modern novel, Defoe’s work has been claimed as “a core mythic text of Western and capitalist civilisation over the last three centuries,” with Marx criticising classical bourgeois economists who seized upon the enterprising marooned Crusoe, reduced to the state of natural man, as a model for a perfect market economy.

They had not noticed that he had nevertheless imported to his island, along with the useful tools retrieved from his shipwreck, the ethos of the burgeoning capitalist society in the outside world. Crusoe even kept daily accounts of profit and loss.