Gulliver’s Economized Body: Colonial Projects and the Lusus Naturae in the Travels

The subject of Ireland’s economy pulses through Jonathan Swift’s writings of the 1720s.¹ Appearing initially in A Proposal for the Use of Irish Manufacture (1720) and later in The Drapier’s Letters (1724–5) and A Modest Proposal (1729), two common prescriptive refrains emerge as key components of Swift’s economic theory. Through the proto-economists or “economic projectors” in these works, Swift argues that the Irish must first start consuming only their own products (whether Irish linens or Irish babies) in order to establish the second, long-term goal of economic and political freedom from England.² Amidst this decade-long concentration on Ireland’s financial affairs, Swift also composed Travels into Several Remote Nations (1726). In fact, in 1725, Swift alternated between the composition of the Travels and The Drapier’s Letters, which effectively united all of Ireland against Wood’s halfpence patent, a dictate from England that threatened to devalue Ireland’s existing currency. This concurrence of composition is most apparent in Book 3 of the Travels, which depicts the political resistance of the people of Lindalino, who unite to fight against the tyrannical acts of the king and his flying island of Laputa.³ Functioning as a kind of allegorical wish-fulfillment for political and economic autonomy, the Lindalinians, “who had often complained of great oppressions, shut down the town gates, seized the governor, and with incredible speed and labour erected four large towers, one at every corner of the city…. The people were unanimous, and had laid in store of provisions,” and they follow this behavior with “very bold demands, the redress of all their grievances, great immunities, their choice of their own governor, and other the like exorbitances.”⁴ In this passage, Swift sketches the central points that the Drapier emphasizes over the course of his seven Letters: joining together to be self-reliant and, ultimately, forging independence from an oppressive governmental body.

For readers aware of A Modest Proposal, Swift’s economic preoccupation is also clear at the end of Book 4, in which Gulliver flays the hides of baby yahoos to craft sails for his canoe. This grotesque resourcefulness anticipates the modest proposer’s plan to use all parts of Irish babies to resolve Ireland’s rampant poverty.⁵ In arguing for the fiscal soundness of consuming a “young healthy child well nursed… whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled,” the proposer notes, “Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay the carcass; the skin of which artificially dressed will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.”⁶ Although critics have attended to these sections of Books 3 and 4, they have underreported the significance to the Travels of Swift’s economic discourse.⁷ Much has been written on the general topic of Swift’s economic thought, as well as on his concerns about the distinctive case of Ireland’s colonial situation: it was a “kingdom” that was nevertheless subject to economic sanctions and political dictates from England.⁸ Developing this line of inquiry, I suggest that by viewing Gulliver as an economic projector in line with the modest proposer and the Drapier we gain a fuller understanding of the particular economic and colonial concerns of the Travels. After all, Gulliver himself admits, “I had my self been a sort of projector in my younger days” (183). Constantly invoking England’s colonial powers to justify himself and his travels, Gulliver exhibits a projector’s preoccupation with the governmental and economic structures of the nations he visits.

Rather than focusing primarily on issues of domestic consumption, Gulliver’s narration in the Travels depicts the creation, control, and circulation of commodities between both colonized and colonizing peoples and nations. These commodities are not, however, manufactured products. Echoing the logic of projectors like the seventeenth-century economist and Royal Society Fellow Sir William Petty and eighteenth-century economists such as Thomas Prior and Arthur Dobbs, the narrative logic of the Travels takes seriously the economic tenet that “people are the wealth of the nation...