as heroic pioneers or victims of circumstance—social roles rather than flesh-and-blood people. This chapter’s concentration on the career and writing of Andrew Yarranton works against the reduction of projector to placeholder by foregrounding an actual human who brought schemes to public notice. However, intensive focus on one figure begs the question of how “projector” came to name a multiplicity of people who inaugurated a self-conscious age of enterprise. It would be impossible to formulate a coherent category, “projector,” that accommodates all of early modern England’s entrepreneurs, pamphleteers, engineers, and experimenters. However, comparing the biographical details of a subset of projectors, the improvement propagandists of Yarranton’s age, takes a step in that direction by delivering a more realistic and fine-grained portrait than the one we have inherited from critics and historians.
Perhaps most formative among these shared biographical details was the fact that Yarranton’s contemporaries lived through a rapid succession of disparate political regimes between the reign of Charles I and the Hanoverian Dynasty. While some projectors, like Carew Reynell (1636–90), remained devout royalists throughout their careers, others, like Yarranton (1619–84), trimmed their sails to prevailing political winds to ensure their proposals were heard. This was no easy task. The improver Josiah Child (1631–99) served as deputy treasurer of the Protectorate navy at Portsmouth but later lost the lucrative right to sell beer and victuals to the fleets because James Stuart suspected him of supporting Shaftesbury. Hugh Chamberlen (1664–1728), author of Several Matters Relating to the Improvement of Trade (1700), lost his post as physician to Charles II under suspicions of Whig loyalties (a misgiving he would validate by later joining Monmouth’s Rebellion). The builder and insurance salesman Nicholas Barbon (1637–98) bore the infamous name of his father, Praisegod Barbon, the Millenarianist politician from whom Cromwell’s “Barebones Parliament” took its title, but he showed few signs of a radical Puritan upbringing. Projectors of Yarranton’s age sought to mitigate or capitalize on their pasts, a self-reckoning that often had the adverse effect of increasing their notoriety. Successful schemers needed to establish meaningful ties with ruling parties and monarchs without foreclosing opportunities for action under future governments.
Projectors hailed from the city and country, though most seem to have lived in southern England. Many enjoyed privileged upbringings, either as the sons of London merchants (Samuel Fortrey and John Bellers), or by inheriting rural estates (Reynell). Few seem to have been exceedingly rich or completely destitute, and therefore most showed some desire to make money. Projectors were seldom as penurious as their critics suggested, though a number, like Roger Coke and Daniel Defoe, faced the prospect of debtor’s prison in the wake of failed ventures.26 Several seventeenth-century improvers attended Oxford or Cambridge, many training to become physicians or lawyers. A few, such as Barbon and Richard Weston, were educated at Leiden and Utrecht and in Flanders, and like Yarranton, drew on their experiences abroad to propose improvements in England.
Yarranton would stress his involvement with the political and economic affairs of a realm he proposed to modernize. But he was a veritable outsider compared to other projectors who were elected to Parliament (Barbon, Mackworth, Child) and fellows to the Royal Society (John Houghton, Chamberlen). A small number of projectors were knighted, including Humphrey Mackworth, Hugh Chamberlen, and, to Defoe’s lasting chagrin, the shipwreck explorer William Phips.27
A projector’s proximity to power often shaped what (s)he sought through writing. Some proposed schemes in order to obtain governmental office, such as Reynell, who had designs on joining the Board of Trade, and Samuel Fortrey, who succeeded in becoming Clerk of the Deliveries of the Ordnance seven years after his England’s Interest and Improvement (1663) appeared. Others wrote pamphlets to advance business interests. Nicholas Barbon’s advocacy of free trade and house construction would complement the insurance office he opened in 1680. Mackworth wrote an improvement tract, England’s Glory (1694), before later organizing the joint-stock company Mineral Manufactures of Neath (1713). Other projectors insisted that they wrote out of a genuine interest in the public good, and there is often little evidence to refute these claims. What John Evelyn hoped to gain from his anti-air-pollution pamphlet Fumifugium (1661), or Moses Pitt sought to make from his prison reform treatise The Cry of the Oppressed (1691) is probably irreducible to profit and fame.
As a former republican official, for-hire engineer, and energetic pamphleteer, Andrew Yarranton personified all these motivations. His fraught career in projects epitomizes the difficulty of existing within a society while trying to change it. His England’s Improvement was one proposal “amongst others” but foregrounded projection’s universal need for authorial self-fashioning, whose terms and stakes we can grasp only by turning to Yarranton’s own words.
Possessing Dutch Progress
The first word of Yarranton’s title, England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (Figure 1), designates England as either an object or agent of improvement. The possessive adjective “England’s” implies that the kingdom can receive improvement, that its lands and people could be put to better use. The word alternatively endows England with the capacity to pursue improvement, to enhance itself through collective action. What England has, according to Yarranton, is a series of deficiencies and the power to remedy them. The pamphlet’s textual content belongs to one author, “Andrew Yarranton, Gent.”; but its enacted outcomes will become the entire nation’s grammatical possession. Improvement denotes both a pursuit and a destination, a program for controlling the future and an attribute of the future itself. Yarranton forges consensus support for his plans by addressing England as a single, unified entity in the style of William Carter’s England’s Interest Asserted (1669), Samuel Fortrey’s England’s Interest and Improvement (1673), and Roger Coke’s England’s Improvements (1675). Like Yarranton’s England’s Improvement, these works pledge to salvage new utility from existing assets; their titles entitle England to unreaped benefits while imagining the nation as a “seamless whole.”28
Figure 1. Title page of Andrew Yarranton’s England’s Improvement by Sea and Land. RB 148563, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
England’s Improvement divides the proleptic possession of future value into discrete activities. “By Land,” improvement entails harvesting timber to build ships, making shallow rivers navigable, fireproofing cities, employing poor subjects, and supplying London with “Bread and Drink.” These measures would strengthen England “by Sea” by stimulating exports, relieving debt, and positioning the kingdom to surpass its Continental trade rival, the Dutch Republic, “without fighting.” Yarranton introduces these measures through infinitive sentence fragments—to out-do, to pay, to set at work, to prevent—phrases that seem to insist on a course of action without assigning that action an agent. The paradoxical injunction “To Pay Debts without Moneys,” for instance, arrests readers without specifying a payer or payee. Yarranton’s ambiguity is deliberate. His title evokes outcomes without specifying means to lure readers into the pages of the pamphlet, where he describes at great length concrete solutions to the kingdom’s most debilitating problems.
“People confess they are sick,” observes Yarranton in a prefatory letter; “trade is in a Consumption, and the whole Nation languishes.”29 By portraying England as a victim of consumptive disease, England’s Improvement proposes itself as a bill of treatments, and its author as caregiver to the tuberculin national body politic. England’s lack of vitality stems from dysfunction at home and competition from abroad. First, Yarranton censures his readers for failing to take advantage of “our Climate, the Nature of our Soil, and the Constitution of Both our People and Government,” arguing that temperate weather and mild rule oblige industry.30 The kingdom’s fortunate “our” implies an active “we” who must labor in gratitude for God’s
