Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland by Sean O. Moore (review)

Even today, in Ireland, Swift is a national saint, admired and adulated since he never tired of fighting against Britain’s attempt to turn the Emerald Isle into a colony. Basing an interpretation on the solid foundation of traditional Swift scholarship as well as on the principles of the “new economic criticism”—a syncretic mélange of enlightened Marxism and postcolonialism—Mr. Moore demonstrates that each of Swift’s pamphlets and satires displays subtle political and economic subtexts, which may be interpreted as verbal explosions invented in order to destroy Britain’s political, social, and cultural hegemony. The relation between Ireland and Britain during the eighteenth-century’s “cultural war,” with Ireland fighting against a much grander and more powerful nation, was seen through Irish eyes as a struggle against a “fiscal-military state,” eager to develop an imperial political system.

Since the British government had to finance a standing army and a powerful navy after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, it was in constant need of money. To raise funds, the “Protestant Interest,” a group of ambitious Anglo-Irish landowners, made a national security loan to the Irish Treasury; this money served military purposes exclusively and was to be paid back by Irish taxes and residues. Though no friend of this exploitative financial system reminiscent of Roman and Milanese Monti Banks, Swift recognized that this Irish Monti Bank exuded an intense energy implementable to achieve liberty from the English tyranny. Mr. Moore demonstrates that, due to the complex affiliation of economy, society, culture, and literature, Ireland—perhaps for the first time in her history—had a chance to achieve sovereignty. His main argument can be expressed simply: all of Swift’s “Irish works,” from A Tale of A Tub (1704) to A Modest Proposal (1729), attack Britain and the Anglo-Irish Protestants, simultaneously turning the initial fight against material exploitation into an appeal for the establishment of an original, sovereign Irish print culture that necessarily precedes a new national identity.

Mr. Moore’s close reading of Swift’s satires enables him to analyze the homological affiliations between “texts” and “textiles”; in his Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, for instance, Swift blames England for the practice of coercing Ireland into producing “raw wool” only, thus preventing the Irish weavers from converting their wool into valuable cloth that might be exported at reasonable prices. Mr. Moore maintains that Swift is only partly interested in the textile industry; he interprets Swift’s pamphlets as “allegories of print nationalism.” The wool, the textiles, and “the Irish stuff” are synonyms for “Irish books” and “Irish publications.” In a fierce cultural war against Ireland, England used the printing press as a formidable weapon. The moral weeklies published by Addison and Steele, the many contemporary novels with their description of English life and culture, endeavored to colonize Ireland, and to see to it that the Irish should lead family lives like the English in order to procreate many children, so that the revenues—permanently needed by the Monti Bank—would also be secured in the future.

At the heart of Anglo-Irish struggles was competition between the English and Irish “minting” and “printing” presses. The foundation of an Irish Bank, for example, would have threatened the profits of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, since the Bank could have paid back large amounts of the “Debt of the Nation” and thus render the Monti Bank superfluous. With A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet (1721) or The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders (1720), Swift added to the fierce political and economic quarrels, which were overshadowed by the “South Sea Bubble” (1720). Strictly opposed to “air money” and “paper credit,” Swift criticized the “monied interest” promoted by the Whigs and fought for the “landed interest” favored by the Tories, with whom he sympathized. But again, money and the “Irish stuff,” addressed in his famous attack on...