Combining psychoanalysis, structural and economic anthropology, this book treats Joseph Conrad's interests in exchange, contracts, and the condition of displacement. This is the first extended academic discussion of the social contract idea in the novelist's fiction. Furthermore, the simultaneous concentration on various fields of circulation (for example finances, dialogues, representations of women, or colonial mechanisms) invites the use of theories (Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Simmel, Polanyi and Bataille) whose potentials for Conrad scholarship have not been exhausted (especially not in combination).