This chapter focuses on Swift as a historian. The first section looks at how Swift read historical works: not just what he thought of individual historians, but how he extracted information from their books, marking up pages and jotting down notes. The second deals with Swift’s early attempts at writing works of history. And the third section investigates his efforts to write the history of his own time. Throughout, this chapter emphasises Swift’s concern with the development of the English system of politics. Swift’s historical thought was, this chapter suggests, structural and institutional just as much as it was personal and invective.