Swift and the Geographers: Race, Space and Merchant Capital in Gulliver’s Travels

Abstract

I begin this chapter with these much-quoted lines from Swift’s On Poetry: A Rhapsody because they argue so directly that ‘savagery’ is an invention of geography. Swift attacks geography as fraudulent learning, as a science that is always trying to cover the gaps and inconsistencies that it inevitably confronts by insisting on the barbarousness and barrenness of those regions about which it has little or no knowledge. Like the gaping lines of bad modern poetry, geographers’ texts are filled with fantastic figures that expose their authors’ want of knowledge more than they reveal the real character of the places and peoples they purport to represent. Formally linked by the couplet structure to such ‘gaps’, the ‘unhabitable downs’ are just as probably a convenient cartographic fiction as a reliable depiction of little-explored parts of the world. Rather than accounting for some existing geocultural reality or providing reliable documentation about the kind of human beings to be found in a continent as enormous and unexplored as Africa, Swift points out, ‘savage pictures’ are in fact the product of a dangerous modern ambition to map the entire globe fully and systematically.

So geographers in Afric maps With savage pictures fill their gaps and o’er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns.¹