What if European colonisation was not just enforced by armies, but carefully planted in the cultural imagination through stories that framed conquest as care, and imperial expansion as a civilising mission? Long before colonial scepticism entered mainstream discourse, literature was shaping how readers understood the European colonial project. This book digs into the fertile soil of that fiction. It shows how popular novels like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and works by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in French and Kleist in German, used metaphors of gardening, cultivation, and propagation to present colonisation as a harmonious, even virtuous act. Colonisers became gardeners, indigenous lands fertile but neglected soil, and settlement was imagined as a peaceful reproduction of the European homeland abroad. These narratives did not merely reflect imperial ideology; they helped construct and legitimise it, turning dispossession and domination into stories of improvement and growth. By digging into these literary roots, this book reveals how fiction worked as a powerful tool of cultural propaganda, masking the realities of empire beneath layers of metaphor and myth. What visions of conquest were readers asked to imagine—and how did these visions continue to shape the story of empire long after the pages were closed?
