Jonathan Swift Satire

Jonathan Swift in his satirical writing criticizes the economical deprivation many Irish are going through by introducing the idea of trading into his writing. The trading he utilizes does not indicate regular market trading in which no humans are put into oppression but trading in which Great Britain used to gain its own interest without considering conditions of other parties. Swift amplifies the selfish characteristics of British landlords and nobles by not only overpraising their goodness and drawing parallel between poor Irish and objects being sold, including slaves but also implying the fraud of these greedy landlords. In early 18th century, Great Britain was expanding its colonial powers. It set colonies in the North and South America …show more content…
Barbadoes are a group of islands in the Caribbean responsible for producing a large amount of sugar, a main ingredient of rum. British government has been harvesting sugarcane heavily, and the labor required a big amount of manpower. Employing regular English subjects or other European would cost the British government a hefty amount of money. The cheap and effective solution the government found was to bring African slaves to the islands. Whereas the government needs to pay European workers regularly to persuade them to keep harvesting sugarcane, it only has to purchase the slaves once. Slaves were considered as properties, and, whether the plantation owners and the government pay the slaves or not, the slaves are required to work for their masters. Although Irish men were not physically captured by another human being before being sold to another part of the world against their will as many African slaves were, the poor Europeans were forced by their hopeless economical situations to be put into similar situations faced by African …show more content…
Although he first proclaimed to be from Ireland, he later changed his identity and boasted that he is from Formosa, where almost no one had a single piece of knowledge about its culture, language, and ways of life. Although he surely had a look that did not resemble that of an Asian man but that of a regular Caucasian, he told many people, especially rich nobles, about the unique and bizarre ways of false Formosan culture and its language, a mixture of Greek and Latin tongues. Although many people believed his false stories at first, he later confessed his lies for his own personal gains. Swift, by linking the “very knowing acquaintance” with George Psalmanazar, implies that his proposal is nothing but a “scheme” (Swift 15) that aims to make traders’ lives