While scholars of Middle East studies have recently turned their attention to the connections and contestations between Ottoman and Arab literary modernities, the Tanzimat and al-Nahḍah, the history of literary translation between Arabic and Turkish in the 19th century has largely been left understudied. To address this lacuna, my paper will focus on one set of texts that embody late Arabic-Turkish literary contact: 19th-century Robinson Crusoe translations. Introduced to Ottoman reading publics through Dimitrakis Çelebi’s 1853 Karamanli translation, this foundational text of “the Western canon” was first translated into Turkish in Perso-Arabic letters in 1864 by Ahmed Lutfi, who took as his “source” text nothing other than Qiṣṣat Rūbinṣun Kurūzī—the first print translation of Crusoe in Arabic, published by Protestant missionaries in 1835 in Malta. By the time Lutfi translated the Arabic Crusoe into Turkish—thereby reintroducing the novel to the Ottoman reader through Arabic—Buṭrus al-Bustānī had already published his version of the text: Al-tuḥfah al-Bustānīyah fī al-Asfār al-Kurūzīyah, aw Riḥlat Rūbinṣun Kurūzī, first printed in Beirut in 1861. Traversing the capitals of Arabic and Turkish intellectual production in the 19th century, Crusoe translations and their multiple editions thus provide a provocative case to better situate the exchanges between the Tanzimat and al-Nahḍah within a broader context of Ottoman literary and translational modernity. Approaching the translations in question through a comparative lens, I will benefit from the analytical strengths of Middle East studies while also engaging with the methodologies of literary studies, translation studies, and postcolonial studies. Situating the Crusoe translations within a larger genealogy of translation in Arabic and Turkish, I will primarily attend to their publication, circulation, and reception histories, paratextual elements, material features, and visual components. This historical, material, and visual attention will lead into my close reading, where I will zoom in on the scene that depicts Robinson Crusoe’s encounter with and education of the Carib native soon to be named “Friday.” Juxtaposing postcolonial readings of Robinson Crusoe with postcolonial historiographical perspectives on the late Ottoman Empire, my comparative analysis will ultimately explore how the translations in question linguistically and visually edited Crusoe’s enactment of colonial difference in connection with late Ottoman geopolitical parameters through such categories as race and religion.