After reading Lloyd’s piece, the similarities between the treatment of the Irish and Africans and African Americans by the English during the period of colonialism become much more clear. The arguments for Irish colonization used in many of the citations in Lloyd’s writing reflect staple claims of the British civilizing mission, the argument for colonization based on the “improvement” of “less evolved” societies through English teaching. The attitudes of the British writers cited by Lloyd are almost exactly the same to those promoting the African civilizing mission, which shows that the English viewed the black world and the Irish world as two very similar entities.
The language used to describe the Irish by the English is similarly racist to the language used to describe blacks and makes very similar arguments to those describing the colonization of the African continent. Lloyd’s citation of Thomas Carlyle reads, “The time has come when the Irish population must either be improved a little, or else exterminated… In a state of perennial ultra-savage famine, in the midst of civilization, they cannot continue,” (9). This statement is a disturbing, yet accurate depiction of what the civilizing mission philosophy entails; one either conforms to the English way of life or must be eliminated by that way of life. Civilizations that are not in line with English ideas of modernity are all viewed as inferior under this philosophy, and the African and Irish civilizations are viewed as similar under this philosophy due to their similar apparent lack of modernity. Another quote from Carlyle says, “Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns… In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all the work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back,” (9). Carlyle describes the Irish as savages in a manner similar to the racist descriptions of black individuals. But he also says the Irish will physically “darken” the towns of the British, implying that the Irish are viewed as “black” individuals. Carlyle goes on further to describe the Irish as “white negroes” and claims that the emancipation of the West Indies would turn the nation into a “Black Ireland, ‘free’ indeed, but an Ireland, and Black!” (10). This racist dialogue implies that the English believed there was an inherent similarity between blacks and the Irish due to the two groups’ lack of modernity, and it is this very lack of modernity that caused the English to see these two peoples as a plague to cultured society.
Swift’s echo of this theme, in the conflict of the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos, also shows these ideas of racial superiority and the rights of owning and “editing” bodies of those deemed to be sub-human. As Swift uses satire in “A Modest Proposal” and part IV of “Gulliver’s Travels” to illustrate genocide for the convenience of a majority class or race, so does Carlyle believe the Irish must be somehow dealt with in order to stop their encroachment upon Britain with their needs and wishes. Because of their perception as not only non-British and non-modern peoples, but even non-human to a certain extent, the Irish could be starved and economically exploited by the British because their impoverished and starving status apparently indicated their beastly nature beneath a humanoid figure, much like the description of Swift’s Yahoos. The Houyhnhnms have become tired of the Yahoos and their passionate and wild counterpoint to the Houyhnhnms’ own life of reason and intellect. In order to solve this apparent crisis, the Houyhnhnms and even Gulliver suggest genocide and even mass castration as effective population control, although the plan falls through. Each society’s belief that they have the right to eliminate an entire race because they view them as sub-human gets to the heart of the problem of imperialism, with a majority group giving a subjugated people the impossible task of assuming the majority’s way of life and customs or the consequence of death.