Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels took the reading world by storm in the autumn of 1726. “Gulliver is in everybody’s hands,” Swift’s friend the Tory doctor John Arbuthnot proclaimed in November of that year. 1 This was not the hyperbole of a friend. Recent scholars have estimated that readers purchased over 20,000 copies of the book by December 1726. 2 Swift’s contemporaries and his more recent critics have both been drawn to Book IV in which Lemuel Gulliver visits the land of the ultra-rational horse people, the Houyhnhnms. After being forced to leave the land of the horse people and their humanoid antagonists, the yahoos, Swift’s protagonist Lemuel Gulliver decides not to provide “a memorial to a Secretary of State” detailing the discoveries he made in his various travels. Such a memorial, Gulliver is well aware, might launch new colonies since “whatever lands are discovered by a subject, belong to the crown.” In explaining his decision, Gulliver delivers a stinging critique of the “distributive justice” of those who promoted what he called “a modern colony.” 3
Why did Swift choose to leave his reader with such a powerful condemnation of modern colonies? What was the relationship between Swift’s 1726 imaginative pronouncements, and his political-economic writings on Ireland—including the Drapier’s Letters—of the 1720s? What might Swift have meant by his condemnation of a “modern” as opposed to an ancient colony?
For most scholars, these questions can be easily answered. Those who have focused on Swift have highlighted his consistent and precocious anticolonial attitudes. Scholars of empire, by contrast, have emphasized Swift’s intellectual innovations by insisting that the 1720s was a period devoid of debate about empire.
For most of those interested in analyzing Jonathan Swift’s intellectual output, Gulliver’s outburst at the end of Gulliver’s Travels was a typical, though pointed, statement of Swift’s own anticolonial sentiments. 4 Swift scholarship is not noted for interpretative consensus. Scholars have insisted on seeing Swift as a consistent Whig, a committed Tory, a closet Jacobite. Others have sought to approach his work from a new critical, a psychoanalytic, a historicist, or a postcolonial perspective. Yet most have concurred that Swift’s voice was an anticolonial one. For Ian Higgins , “Gulliver’s hyperbolic praise of British colonial Christianity is a devastating Swiftian sarcasm against colonialism which also unmasks the rhetoric of Whiggish ecclesiastical imperialism.” This, Higgins suggests, is of a piece with “Swift’s anti-colonial rhetoric in his imaginative staire and in polemic such as the Drapier’s Letters.” 5 David Nokes agrees that Swift wrote the Drapier’s Letters “to challenge” the British “colonial system.” 6 For Clement Hawes , “Gulliver’s Travels remains, even today, an effective critique of colonialism in any form.” 7 By the end of Gulliver’s Travels , Carole Fabricant notes, the protagonist “rejects colonialism with a scathing denunciation that substitutes Britain’s brutal conquest of overseas territories for its harsh oppressions in Ireland.” After editing Swift’s Irish writings, Fabricant concluded that Swift was “a critic of colonialism.” 8 Such a view accords perfectly with the work of the proponent of the new economic criticism, Sean Moore . In Moore’s view, one aspect of Swift’s “anti-modernization agenda” is his “unflattering portrait of English imperial power” in Gulliver’s Travels . For Moore, at least by implication, imperialism is the necessary concomitant of economic modernization, of a transition to capitalism. 9 These literary readings of Swift, of course, fit snugly with an earlier account of the emergence of the ideological origins of Anglo-American republicanism. Caroline Robbins in her classic study of The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman grouped Swift along with Robert Molesworth , William Molyneux , Samuel Madden , Henry Maxwell , Arthur Dobbs , and George Berkeley as Irishmen who advocated “antimercantilist ideas, and urged reconsideration by the London administration of the Irish situation.” “Irish circumstances,” Robbins affirms, “stimulated the development and spread of liberal ideas,” ideas that would reach their fullest fruition in the radicalism of the age of George III. 10
Imperial historians, by contrast, have implied that Swift’s condemnation of modern colonies was innovative and brilliant precisely because there was, as yet, no coherent discussion of the British Empire. It was only “in the 1740s and 1750s,” argued Kathleen Wilson , that “trade and empire, the nature of the national character, and the relationship of all three to Britain’s political leadership” became “potent, and related, issues, in and out of parliament.” 11 David Armitage agrees that “the British Empire was conceived as a political community incorporating Britain, Ireland and the plantations during the 1730s.” Armitage insists that a “pan-Atlantic conception of Empire” could not emerge until the 1730s because of “the failure” of “Walpole and his ministers to square the circle and fashion a suitable theory of empire.” 12 Brendan Simms , who is much more alive to the imperial questions of the early eighteenth century than Wilson or Armitage, nevertheless insists that in the 1720s “British politics and foreign policy … were dominated by events in the Holy Roman Empire.” Politics in the 1720s “was dominated not by colonial rivalries … but by the old ‘imperial’ problem of how to prevent the Holy Roman Empire from being used as a base from which to outflank the Barrier [of the Southern Netherlands ], and to overturn the European balance of power upon which British security depended.” 13 Because there was no British imperial debate in the 1720s, because colonial issues were overshadowed by European ones, Swift’s writings in the 1720s must be understood in a narrowly Anglo-Irish context. “Swift,” David Oakleaf has insisted, “invariably adopts an Irish perspective on English politics.” 14
Against these views, I suggest that Swift’s critique of British imperialism was more complex and more equivocal than most scholars have assumed. By placing Swift’s writings in a narrowly Anglo-Irish context, scholars have missed the lively, contentious, and sophisticated discussion of imperial issues taking place right across the British colonies in the second and third decades of the eighteenth century. In every instance, these debates took place in the context of partisan strife, but that partisanship was becoming increasingly complex. In Ireland, but also right across the empire, Walpoleian Whigs, opposition Whigs, and Tories advanced very different visions of empire. These prescriptions, themselves, depended on competing political-economic understandings. Placed in this matrix, Swift’s denunciation of “modern” colonies needs to be understood not as an argument against the empire, but as an argument against the competing commercial visions of the different branches of Whiggery. In fact, Swift believed both that Ireland should not be treated as a colony—it was properly one of the three kingdoms—and that colonies that produced precious metals or important raw materials were entirely justifiable.
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Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels in an era of imperial crisis and reformulation. In rapid succession, a series of crises shook the British Empire in the second two decades of the eighteenth century. Spain threatened the Bahamas, South Carolina , and Gibraltar , while Britain’s Whig government drew up plans to attack Havana during the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–1720). These developments, thought Edward Synge , Archbishop of Tuam and longtime friend of William Wake, were of “the greatest importance” in which “we and indeed all Europe is concerned.” 15 Swift’s friend John Arbuthnot thought it amusing to see the Jacobite Duke of Berwick, as an officer in the French army at war with Spain , joining forces with Britain “to reduce the exorbitant power of Spain.” 16...