| This study places Jonathan Swift's economic pamphlets in context with those by Anglo-Irish writers of the period immediately following the publication of the Drapier's Letters, specifically the years 1727--32. This era, overlooked in many analyses of eighteenth-century Irish history, was one of the century's most bleak: Ireland was wracked by crop failures, famine, scarce coin, flagging trade, emigration, unemployment, and severe poverty. Past scholarship has placed greater emphasis on Swift's controversial works on Irish political and economic dependency and ignored other, equally important figures in Irish economic thought. These include John Browne, Thomas Prior, David Bindon, Arthur Dobbs, James Maculla, Samuel Madden, John Perceval, Robert Molesworth, and numerous anonymous writers. Historical studies like Louis Cullen's have neglected or dismissed the works of these authors as inaccurate, unsophisticated, or too politically charged to be deemed trustworthy or relevant. Read within the context of the crises of the late 1720s, their complaints against Irish dependency may qualify them as "dangerous Authors," Swift's description of writers on liberty like John Locke, Algernon Sidney, William Molyneux, and Robert Molesworth. These Anglo-Irish pamphleteers relied on an established framework of seventeenth-century texts on liberty and political economics, including the works of William Petty, author of the Political Anatomy of Ireland (1691). Their pamphlets are colored by their ambiguous identity as English colonists in a conquered nation. Politically dependent and socially inferior, the Anglo-Irish are neither wholly English nor Irish. Culturally identifying with England, these pamphleteers were yet sympathetic to the plight of the natives; economic and financial matters gave them a tool with which to unify the interests of a divided Ireland. The rhetoric and practice of self-improvement rehearsed in the pamphlets of the 1720s was institutionalized in the formation of the Dublin Society in 1731. Although not committed to independence in its strictest sense, these writers embody a variety of economic patriotism that demanded financial independence, political union with England, or an amalgamation of both. Though they sometimes complained of their colonial dependency, most were not prepared to reject the English identity that gave them their authority. |
