Utopus’s conquest of Abraxa and excavation of the channel are presented as the founding act that made Utopia an island and began its transformation into a distinct political community. The episode combines conquest, collective forced labor, and an engineered boundary: the channel separates the territory from the continent, while the account credits Utopus with establishing the government that later distinguishes its inhabitants.

Conquest and the Making of Utopia

Raphael Hythloday recounts that Utopia was not originally an island but part of the continent, then called Abraxa. Utopus conquered the territory and, after subduing its inhabitants, set about separating it from the mainland by bringing the sea around it. The narrative makes territorial transformation inseparable from political rule: Utopus is said to have brought the inhabitants from a supposedly rude and uncivilized condition to a government and degree of refinement that, in Raphael’s judgment, surpass those of other peoples.

The island’s name preserves the conqueror’s authority in its geography. Abraxa becomes Utopia, named for Utopus, while the people’s political reformation is narrated as part of the same founding process. This account establishes a foundational tension: the society’s celebrated order begins not with voluntary agreement but with conquest and the imposition of a new political arrangement.

The Channel and Its Human Cost

To isolate the territory, Utopus ordered a channel fifteen miles long to be dug. Raphael emphasizes the scale and speed of the undertaking: a vast number of workers were set to it, and the work was completed sooner than observers expected. The labor was imposed on the conquered inhabitants and on Utopus’s own soldiers. The account presents the soldiers’ participation as evidence that the conquered people were not made to bear the burden alone; nevertheless, both groups were compelled to work.

The channel thus serves two purposes in the episode. It is a physical separation from the continent and a public demonstration of the new ruler’s capacity to mobilize labor on a great scale. Neighbors who had initially laughed at the project changed their response when it was finished, becoming astonished and fearful. The reversal makes the completed work a display of power as well as an engineering achievement.

Geography as Defense

The separation reshaped the island’s defenses. Its principal bay is sheltered and useful for commerce, but its entrance is dangerous, obstructed by rocks and shallows. A tower stands on the one rock visible above the water, where a garrison is maintained; other hazards lie submerged. Knowledge of the safe passage belongs to the natives, and even they depend on markers along the coast. If those markers were shifted slightly, an invading fleet could be wrecked.

The account also describes other harbors and a coastline fortified by both nature and human design, such that a small force could prevent a much larger army from landing. The channel’s political consequence is therefore not merely that water now surrounds Utopia: the island’s difficult approaches help make its separation strategically consequential. Geography, local knowledge, and defensive construction together protect the polity founded by conquest.

Later Land Policy and the Founding Story

Utopian population and land rules provide a later context for the founding episode, though Raphael does not state that they were directly caused by it. When population increases, Utopians send colonists to the neighboring continent if they find more land than its inhabitants can cultivate. They admit local people who agree to live under Utopian rules, but drive out those who refuse and use force if they resist. The stated justification is that a nation should not prevent others from using land it leaves idle and uncultivated. This policy echoes the founding story’s close connection between territorial control, cultivation, and political order, while exposing the coercive edge of that language: claims about productive use can authorize displacement.

Raphael tells the island’s history within his account of Utopian institutions, after explaining that he lived among the Utopians for five years and defending their government against doubts about common life. Thomas More’s request for a detailed description leads Raphael to begin with the island’s soil, rivers, towns, people, customs, constitution, and laws. The origin story consequently frames the society as both a political example and a product of forceful territorial change. Set beside Raphael’s earlier criticism of English enclosure, where pasture expansion drives people from their homes and livelihoods, Utopia’s founding invites comparison without making the two processes identical: one is presented as an effort to establish a new polity, the other as private accumulation that impoverishes the country.