The Pineapple and Colonial Enterprise in Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines

This essay establishes a West Indian context for Henry Neville’s dystopian vision of English society in The Isle of Pines (1668), arguing that “Pine” is a direct reference to the pineapple fruit and placing the text in conversation with Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657). In so doing, the essay investigates the cultural, political, and ideological resonances of the pineapple in the text, particularly regarding royalist discourse in seventeenth-century England and debates about the use of slave labor in colonial settings.