The text states that Gulliver's ship (the Antelope) was bound for the East Indies when it was caught in "a violent storm to the northwest of Van Diemen's Land" (Tasmania).

[1] Likewise, the map depicts Lilliput and Blefuscu south of "Hogs Island" (Simeulue), off northwest Sumatra, and northwest of Van Diemen's Land, though the map is considerably foreshortened; Van Diemen's Land is shown south of the Sunda Strait, some 10° (700 miles) east of Hogs Island, whereas Tasmania is actually some 40° (2,500 miles) east of that meridian.

[11] However, the map showing Lilliput's position depicts the islands as considerably larger, approaching the size of Van Diemen's Land.

These issues, generally considered to be of fundamental importance to the constitution of Great Britain, are reduced by Swift to a difference in fashions.

The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to "six rebellions ... wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown".

James II was dead by the time Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels, but his heir James Francis Edward Stuart, also Catholic, maintained his pretensions to the British throne from a court in France (primarily at Saint-Germain-en-Laye) until 1717, and both Jameses were regarded as a serious threat to the stability of the British monarchy until the end of the reign of George II.

The court of the Pretender attracted those Jacobites, and their Tory sympathizers, whose political activity precluded them staying safely in Great Britain; notable among them was Swift's friend, the Anglican Bishop of Rochester Francis Atterbury, who was exiled to France in 1722.

Swift's Lilliputian claims that the machinations of "Big-Endian exiles" at the court of the Emperor of Blefuscu have brought about a continuous war between Lilliput and Blefuscu for "six and thirty moons" (Lilliputians calculate time in "moons", not years; their time-scale, while not one-twelfth the size of normal humans, appears to be somewhat faster, since the emperor was stated to be "past his prime" before he was thirty.)

He offers his services to the Emperor of Lilliput in his war against Blefuscu, and succeeds in capturing the (one-twelfth sized) Blefuscudian fleet.

Despite a triumphant welcome, he soon finds himself at odds with the Emperor of Lilliput, as he declines to conquer the rest of Blefuscu for him and to force the Blefuscudians to adopt Little-Endianism.

This condemnation parallels that issued to the chief ministers of the Tory government that had made peace with France, Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, who was impeached and imprisoned in the Tower of London from 1715 to 1717; and Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, who, after his political fall, received vague threats of capital punishment and fled to France in 1715, where he remained until 1723.

[15] Arbuthnot used this work to satirise Richard Bentley, master of Trinity College, Cambridge[16] but also described the early history of Lilliput and Blefuscu.

[17] It has been pointed out that the long and vicious war that started after a disagreement about which was the best end on which to break an egg is an example of the narcissism of small differences, a term Sigmund Freud coined in the early 1900s.

[18] In 1946, T. H. White wrote Mistress Masham's Repose, which describes the adventures of a girl, Maria, who discovers a group of Lilliputians on a tiny forgotten island in the lake of a ruinous estate in Northamptonshire.

[26] In T. H. White's sequel, Mistress Masham's Repose, the protagonist Maria studies the Lilliputian language from a book owned by her professor friend.

This is a rare copy of Gulliver's 1735 treatise: A General Description of the Empire of Lilliput, from its first Erection, through a long Series of Princes; with a Particular Account of their Wars and Politicks, Laws, Learning, & Religion, their Plants and Animals, their peculiar Manners and Customs, with other Matters very curious and useful, to which is added a Brief Vocabulary of their Language, with its English Correspondencies.