Gulliver's Travels may by general agreement be about difficulties of identity and problems of judgement. But its means to the exposure of these difficulties and problems are descriptions of how people live together in communities of different kinds, how they are governed, or how they govern themselves. Thus the political and social events of Swift's age have a claim on our attention, for the ‘civil Commotions’ which Principal Secretary Reldresal informs Gulliver of in the Empire of Lilliput (I. 4) may in principle stem from the civil commotions of the kingdoms into which Swift was born and have, in their turn, a bearing on the whole history of his time.

‘The meaning of Swift's work will escape anybody who forgets that his English career, long and important as it was, only interrupted an Irish life’ (Ehrenpreis, Swift, I. 8). This claim by Swift's leading biographer in the later twentieth century is clearly important, the more important since historians now propose that the civil wars of the seventeenth century arose as much from the distinctness of the three kingdoms of the British monarchy as from general economic or ideological causes (Russell, Causes, pp. 26-8). Swift grew to young manhood mainly in Ireland, in the aftermath of both the devastating Cromwellian civil war in that kingdom, and of the precarious restoration of the monarchy and episcopal Anglican Church in all three kingdoms in 1660. Associated with the Protestant Ascendancy in predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland, Swift saw a Roman Catholic monarch, James II and VII, begin to introduce pro-Catholic legislation, and thus provoke the defiance, in England, of the Seven Bishops of the established Church. He saw King James lose control of the political situation in the face of the expedition of the Prince of Orange, in 1688, but then found himself surrounded in his last year as a junior member of Trinity College, Dublin, by an Ireland almost all under the control of James II's Deputy, the Earl of Tyrconnel. Soon James himself would land there, and a pro-Catholic parliament sit in Dublin. In Scotland too there was civil war: only in England, the country of Swift's Anglican forebears, did the throne seem to have changed hands in peace.