Like so many 18th-century colonialists, the Proposer cannot conceive of colonized people as anything other commodities, to be sold, bought, and eventually consumed. There is not much difference, Swift suggests, between the everyday activities of Ireland’s rich and the Proposer’s literal cannibalism. In Ireland, the wealthy were already (figuratively) devouring the poor. He is blind not only to the clear ethical problems posed by his suggestions to cure the economic crisis through cannibalism, but also to the fact that anyone reading his pamphlet will quickly judge him to be psychotic.Īt the same time, the Proposer’s inclination towards cannibalism illustrates, in painfully literal terms, the power dynamic between English colonial rule and the widely impoverished Irish populace. What he has in learning and rhetorical skill he seems to utterly lack in common sense and morality. The Proposer serves as the chief representative of this class. Swift paints this group as vain, pompous, predatory, and disastrously out of touch with the humanity of the lower classes. “A Modest Proposal” relentlessly lampoons this wealthy, educated, English, Protestant ruling class-a class, it should be mentioned, to which Swift himself partly belonged. To put it simply, a minority of wealthy, Protestant Englishman held all the power over a disenfranchised Irish-Catholic majority. By 1729, Irish Catholics, though greater in number than their Protestant rulers, owned less of the land, and they couldn’t vote. English rule grew increasingly oppressive as it became a Protestant country, while the vast majority of the Irish remained Catholic. Beginning in the 12th century, England ruled its neighboring island Ireland, essentially treating it as a colony.
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