How does this story illuminate imperialism

Swift was born in Dublin seven months after the death of
his father. He was a Protestant in a predominantly Catholic country and a member of the
Ascendancy, that is, one of the privileged class who were supported by the English to
run their colonial property, Ireland. The oppression of Ireland was at its most intense
during theperiod when Swift was there. Swift was always the most political of the
18th-century satirists. As the battles between the Whigs and the Tories (liberals and
conservatives) evolved, he fired off pamphlets from a radical Tory position. As the
Whigs came into ascendancy, Swift returned to Ireland, to live. From Dublin, he fired
off the most powerful of his pamphlets demanding justice for Ireland. The most famousof
these pamphlets is A Modest Proposal (1729). The pamphlet is written in the persona of
an English economist, who is imbued with the rational principlesof Adam Smith and free
enterprise. This social scientist has turned his mind to the perennial problems
ofIreland—hunger and overpopulation—and come up with an ingenious solution:
state-sponsored cannibalism. Swift’s anger bleeds through in his detailed plan for
breeding Irish children and selling one-year-olds asmeat “at an entertainment for
friends; and when the family dines alone. …” We are horrified by the proposal,but we
also find it funny. Satire was never more powerfully relevant to man’s inhumanity to
man. He was not merely anti-imperialist but wanted colonies to be treated well to bring
great rewards to their empires.