Abstract: Defoe's novel, Captain Singleton, tells the story of the English merchant Singleton's experience of plundering gold in Africa and other places through piratical trade and bringing it home for storage, thus revealing the double faces of the English late mercantilist monetary policy in 18^th century. On the one hand, late mercantilism emphasized establishing monetary and commercial order at home; on the other hand, however, it encouraged English businessmen to engage in predatory trade overseas. All this made English national identity vacillate between a modern patronizing commercial country and a piratical empire. The process of Singleton's return to England as a businessman after putting his overseas exploration to an end can be understood as an embodiment of England's efforts to purify its image and highlight its characteristics as a modern commercial society. The novel does not stop at combining monetary policy with the construction of national identity. More importantly, Defoe deconstructed, by using a new fictional genre that blends romance and realism, the English claim in the 18^th century that England promoted the global economic development and underscored the lingering dark side of the English national identity in the 18^th century. Generally speaking, the description of “gold” in Captain Singleton reveals the economic origin of the paradox of English national identity in the 18^th century and, therefore, has a distinctive function of cultural criticism.

Key words: Captain Singleton, gold, English national identity, novel form, global trade