The Politics of A Modest Proposal: Swift and the Irish Crisis of the Late 1720s

Abstract Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729) is widely regarded as the most brilliant satire in the English language, but its political context has never been properly explored. Some literary scholars have presented the tract as a parody of political economy; others have concentrated on the imputation of cannibalism, the distinguishing mark of the savage, which Swift redirects away from the natives towards the English settlers and their descendants. But nobody has convincingly related A Modest Proposal to the Irish parliamentary debates and pamphlet discussions of the late 1720s, when three successive harvest failures led to food riots in southern ports, large-scale emigration from the north, and thousands of deaths. Nor has anyone seriously investigated Swift’s hatred of the Irish landlord class, which provides A Modest Proposal with its most powerful, animating grievance. During the 1720s disputes over estate management, leasing practices and the relative merits of tillage and pastoral agriculture reflected the spiralling sense that the colonial mission of Ireland’s Protestant elite was on the point of collapse. Swift joined other patriotic commentators in deploring the conversion of arable land to pasture and the resultant expulsion of communities of villagers. Political economists marshalled statistics to demonstrate that human tenants could be as profitable as livestock. A dramatic deterioration in relations between Ireland’s clerical intelligentsia and the landed elite encouraged a distinct strain of social criticism among Anglican clergymen, who blamed landowners for depopulating the countryside ‐ something that Swift repeatedly associated with those barbarous man-eaters of ancient times, the Scythians. For a century and a half the cultivation of Irish soil had been a barometer of the civilising process; consequently the figure of the grazier had become for Swift the epitome of Irish perversity and self-destruction.