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“WHAT PAINS has Scotland taken to be poor!” Daniel Defoe proclaims in Caledonia, his poem and pro-Union propaganda piece of 1706 (17). The poem offers the landed gentry of Scotland an analysis of the causes of the country’s poverty and prescriptions to improve its economic fortunes. Although he presents his recommendations as an observer and admirer of Scotland, the poem is part of Defoe’s body of political work, written while he was employed by Robert Harley to sway English and Scottish opinion in favor of the Union. Maximilian Novak observes that although Defoe presents himself during this period as a journalist,“his specialty was a powerful rhetoric in prose and poetry”(Daniel Defoe 26). Given that the subject of the poem is how Scotland can alleviate its poverty through political union with England, despite Defoe’s claims to the contrary, it is important to ask what kind of economic rhetoric Defoe employs to persuade his audience to vote for the Union. Caledonia has been analyzed from a variety of perspectives: as an expression of Defoe’s realism in depicting Scotland as it actually is (Novak, Transformations fn 32, 195), an application of scientific reason to Scotland’s issues (Novak,“Daniel Defoe,” 52-56), a set of political arguments to show that Scotland and England have similar values (Peraldo, pars. 9-14 and 30-31), and as an example of contemporary topographical poetry (Backscheider, Daniel Defoe 38-39), among others. Novak says that Defoe sees his own work as a “literary recreation” of the real world, and that is true in Caledonia insofar as the poem offers observations of Scotland’s resources and condition …