Defoe was a prolific and versatile writer, producing more than three hundred works[4]—books, pamphlets, and journals—on diverse topics, including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural.

[17] In 1685, Defoe joined the ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion but gained a pardon, by which he escaped the Bloody Assizes of Judge George Jeffreys.

His most successful poem, The True-Born Englishman (1701), defended William against xenophobic attacks from his political enemies in England, and English anti-immigration sentiments more generally.

In 1701, Defoe presented the Legion's Memorial to Robert Harley, then Speaker of the House of Commons—and his subsequent employer—while flanked by a guard of sixteen gentlemen of quality.

The death of William III in 1702 once again created a political upheaval, as the king was replaced by Queen Anne who immediately began her offensive against Nonconformists.

[25] In it, he ruthlessly satirised both the high church Tories and those Dissenters who hypocritically practised so-called "occasional conformity", such as his Stoke Newington neighbour Sir Thomas Abney.

In exchange for such cooperation with the rival political side, Harley paid some of Defoe's outstanding debts, improving his financial situation considerably.

[28] In the same year, he set up his periodical A Review of the Affairs of France,[29] which supported the Harley Ministry, chronicling the events of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1714).

One pamphlet was originally published anonymously, entitled A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal the Next Day after her Death to One Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury The 8th of September, 1705.

By September 1706, Harley ordered Defoe to Edinburgh as a secret agent, and to secure acquiescence by using "underhand methods to predispose Scots' opinion in favour of"[31] the Treaty of Union.

He was then able to influence the proposals that were put to Parliament and reported, Having had the honour to be always sent for the committee to whom these amendments were referrèd,I have had the good fortune to break their measures in two particulars via the bounty on Corn andproportion of the Excise.For Scotland, he used different arguments, even the opposite of those which he used in England, usually ignoring the English doctrine of the Sovereignty of Parliament, for example, telling the Scots that they could have complete confidence in the guarantees in the Treaty.

Nor does he account for the deviousness of the Duke of Hamilton, the official leader of the various factions opposed to the Union, who seemingly betrayed his former colleagues when he switched to the Unionist/Government side in the decisive final stages of the debate.

In 1709, Defoe authored a lengthy book entitled The History of the Union of Great Britain, an Edinburgh publication printed by the Heirs of Anderson.

[33] Defoe is cited twice in the book as its author,[34][35] and gives details of the events leading up to the Acts of Union 1707, dating as far back as 6 December 1604, when King James I was presented with a proposal for unification.

He made use of his Scottish experience to write his Tour thro' the whole Island of Great Britain, published in 1726, where he admitted that the increase of trade and population in Scotland which he had predicted as a consequence of the Union was "not the case, but rather the contrary".

The "Dear Green Place" and "City of God" required government troops to put down the rioters tearing up copies of the Treaty at almost every mercat cross in Scotland.

Defoe comments on the tendency to attribute tracts of uncertain authorship to him in his apologia Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), a defence of his part in Harley's Tory ministry (1710–1714).

Other works that anticipate his novelistic career include The Family Instructor (1715), a conduct manual on religious duty; Minutes of the Negotiations of Monsr.

In the final decade of his life, he also wrote conduct manuals, including Religious Courtship (1722), The Complete English Tradesman (1726) and The New Family Instructor (1727).

Perhaps his most significant work, apart from the novels, is A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–1727), which provided a panoramic survey of British trade on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

In the work, Defoe discussed the role of the tradesman in England in comparison to tradesmen internationally, arguing that the British system of trade is far superior.

[38] Published when Defoe was in his late fifties,[39] Robinson Crusoe relates the story of a man's shipwreck on a desert island for twenty-eight years and his subsequent adventures.

The novel has been assumed to be based in part on the story of the Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years stranded in the Juan Fernández Islands,[17] but his experience is inconsistent with the details of the narrative.

It is an account of the Great Plague of London in 1665, which is undersigned by the initials "H. F.", suggesting the author's uncle Henry Foe as its primary source.

[44][45][46][47] Colonel Jack (1722) follows an orphaned boy from a life of poverty and crime to prosperity in the colonies, military and marital imbroglios, and religious conversion, driven by a problematic notion of becoming a "gentleman."

Also in 1722, Defoe wrote Moll Flanders, another first-person picaresque novel of the fall and eventual redemption, both material and spiritual, of a lone woman in 17th-century England.

The titular heroine appears as a whore, bigamist and thief, lives in The Mint, commits adultery and incest, and yet manages to retain the reader's sympathy.

Moll Flanders is an important work in the development of the novel, as it challenged the common perception of femininity and gender roles in 18th-century British society.

In History of the Union, he created an expanded list with over a hundred titles that he attributed to Defoe, alongside twenty additional works that he designated as "Books which are supposed to be De Foe's.

Notably, Moll Flanders and Roxana were published anonymously for over fifty years until Francis Noble named Daniel Defoe on their title pages in edition publication in 1775 and 1774.