The Economic Theme in Gulliver's Travels

In 1701 Lemuel Gulliver returns to England from Lilliput, after being rescued by an English merchantman on its way home from Japan, cruising north-east off Van Diemen's Land (or Tasmania on the modern map). Gulliver takes on board ten thousand Sprug coins and a portrait of the king of Lilliput, as well as live animals such as three hundred sheep, six cows, two bulls and as many ewes and rams, intending to "propagate the Breed." (GT, 66)1 He also wanted to take a dozen native Lilliputians but was unable to do so because of the king's injunction against their export. In less than ten months, before setting off on another voyage, he makes "a considerable Profit by showing [his] Cattle to many Persons of Quality, and others" and finally sells them for six hundred pounds (GT, 67). Later, returning from his final voyage, to the Houyhnhnm Land, Gulliver finds that "the Breed is considerably increased, especially the Sheep; which [he hopes] will prove much to the Advantage of the Woolen Manufacture, by the Fineness of the Fleeces" (GT, 68). His account of his Lilliputian sheep seems casual and irrelevant but it illustrates a point I wish to make in this article: that certain passages in Gulliver~ Travels, especially those in Part 111, become meaningful if looked at against the contemporary economic background. It is hardly surprising that Swift has something to say about economics, or "political economy" in the parlance of his age, in his most wide-ranging satire on European culture. The economic theme in Gulliver~ Travels has not been fully appreciated in modern criticism of the work. Critics have tended to emphasise the themes of politics and science, perhaps rightly, but most of thern treat these two strands of satire separately without any attempt to interrelate them. The economic theme is, I think, a possible link between the two. In Gulliver's account of Lilliputian sheep one may find an echo from A Proposal for the Universal Use of lrish Manufacture, the first of a series of Swift's pamphlets on the lrish problems, published in 1720. What Swift proposed in the pamphlet was to boycott all foreign-made (including English) clothes and to use only lrish-made woolen products in order to protect the lrish woolen industry.2 Gulliver as an Englishman is optimistic about the possibility of his Lilliputian sheep becoming a new industry for England. The irony here is that Gulliver's optimism is in sharp contrast to Swift's own stance in the Anglo-Irish trade issues. I shall return to the question of the Anglo-Irish relationship later. Let us consider, here, the