of Plenty” becomes a “project … of publique good.” “Project,” in these two sentences, harbors universal plantation’s lofty but tenuous prospects: its singular ability to happen or not. The word reappears in the next sentence, following a pledge that fruit mandates will strengthen the realm if Parliament ratifies them: “Otherwise we shall but term it (The Embrio of Plenty, and the untimely Birth of good Desires) which had it come to perfection, might have yielded both pleasure and profit to many. And such a Project also it is, as is not without … good Reasons to speak for it; whereof we shall desire to make all rationall man partakers.”9 Designe promises a radiant future while mourning its foreclosure. The author compares his project to premature human life at the same time he grieves its miscarriage: “had it” been completed, the plantation scheme “might have” benefited England, he reflects, entombing seeming opportunity in the past tense. But in the next sentence, Designe emerges from its gloomy report of prospective failure to again revel in present possibilities: “such a Project also it is.” The italicized, capitalized word “Project” insists that “universal plantation” remains a viable plan. The invocation of “this project” reinscribes eternal plenty within a subjunctive future achieved through the reader’s action.
But what is a project? Today, few readers will think twice about this word, which feels familiar, even self-evident in the context of our goal-oriented, enterprise-driven modernity. Such habituation was not yet possible in 1652, when “project” referred not only to the capacity of human ambitions to raise society, but also to alchemical procedures, optical displays, informational charts, and physical motions. One could hatch a project, in the sense of a scheme, jot down thoughts within a table called project, or map the project or schema of a book.10 “Project” was an even more versatile verb: things one could project included light on a surface, a philosopher’s stone in a cauldron, a three-dimensional figure on a two-dimensional plane, and any object—or projectile—through space. These denotations, alive if sometimes obscure today, derive from project’s heterogeneous etymology, whose strands include the Latin prōiectum, for a protruding object, and proicere, meaning to throw or propel, and the Middle French projetter, meaning to plan. The English word first appeared around 1450, though it would not see widespread use until the middle sixteenth century, the same period in which the Italian progetto and Spanish proyecto gained currency. It was in the 1500s that “project,” in its nominal and predicate forms, began to signify the work of conceiving and delivering future outcomes through discrete efforts.
By the early seventeenth century, “project” could refer also to the writing that proposed new enterprise. Designe for Plentie was just one of many works from this era that identified as a project according to the English Short Title Catalogue. Early modern Britain saw “projects” of war and diplomacy.11 The word adorns petitions to abolish doctrinal tests and refine etiquette, to build libraries and administer lotteries.12 William Penn proposed One Project for the Good of England (1679) to unify fractious Protestants against the common enemy of Roman Catholicism. The anonymous New Project to Make England a Florishing Kingdom (1702) singles out Catholics and Jacobites as national enemies and proposes an oath of abjuration to uproot them. Commercial projects endeavored to bolster England’s mercantile economy, cultivate rural land, sanitize London, popularize new commodities, and explore overseas territories.13
These visionary attempts to reform and redirect British society often raised objections, especially among those who had a stake in maintaining the status quo or who advocated alternative schemes, including their own. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, “project” began to connote deceit, hazard, and upheaval. The word could be used to praise the usefulness of inventions in agricultural and mechanical arts or condemn untoward schemes contrived to aggrandize their authors at the public’s expense.14 Distinguishing between projects that were benevolent and malicious, actionable and impossible, posed a stiff challenge to crown officials, legislators, parish officers, investors, and readers in general, who parsed a burgeoning mass of proposals through increasingly pejorative terminology.
“Project” took on a decidedly negative feel in the early Stuart era, when courtiers purchased royal patents in order to launch manufacturing projects that promised to cheapen staples like salt, starch, soap, bricks, and coal. Upon award, most of these fraudulent industrialists abandoned their pretenses of improving trade and instead sought to monopolize it, using patent protections to gouge consumers and amass fortunes.15 Less overtly egregious but equally controversial in the period were a string of patent-backed land improvement initiatives, like fen drainage, which sought to convert the flooded peats of eastern England into arable tillage. This venture promised to raise the value of Anglian soil but also enriched their investors to the detriment of commoners who derived their livelihoods from the partly flooded landscape.16 Projects became so suspect in the early 1600s that a need to identify and make culpable those behind them motivated the coinage of new terms: a “projector” (1596) was an author of projects, while “projection” (1611) and “projecting” (1616) signified the act of creating new schemes.17
Reviled for masking private greed in the language of civic uplift, the scheme-hawking projector continued to haunt discussions of national improvement long after the Caroline era that made this figure notorious. For instance, the English Commonwealth’s confiscation and repurposing of royalist land presented new opportunities for suspect projects.18 Walter Blith, author of The English Improver Improved (1652), the Interregnum’s most important compendium of agricultural proposals, conceded that “there is such a scandall & prejudice among many of you against new projections.”19 Blith had no patience for unfounded ideas in husbandry, though he attempts to redeem the inventive agrarian by characterizing God as the “first projector of that great designe, to bring that old Masse and Chaos of confusion unto so vast an Improvement.”20 Conceiving of his own manual as a divinely endorsed effort to reform postbellum England from the ground up, Blith believed that applying written knowledge to the land would perpetuate the work of creation and advance the Republic’s grand political experiment. England needed new projects, he argued, even if their authors were not always upstanding citizens.
By the Restoration, “project” and its lexical derivatives conjured memories of both Caroline patent seekers and the architects of the failed Republic. In this atmosphere, the Royal Society of London, which was chartered by Charles II but steeped in the protocols of Interregnum scientific correspondence networks, faced critics like Henry Stubbe, who rallied his readers to “oppose these projectors,” claiming that even a peasant would dismiss the Royal Society’s “superlatively ridiculous” ventures as “but projecting.”21 Thomas Sprat anticipated these attacks in his History of the Royal Society (1667), which boasted that the society funded itself through member contributions so they would not be “contemn’d, as vain Projectors.”22 Early modern scientists sought to distinguish their work from England’s tarnished tradition of scheming at a time when the word “project” came to name an attack on the handling, financing, and authorization of natural knowledge.
In 1688, the Whig coup that replaced James II with William of Orange and Mary Stuart catalyzed a new period of speculative activity that the Cripplegate haberdasher and brick maker Daniel Defoe called a “Projecting Age.”23 The formative event of this inventive era was the War of the Grand Alliance, which disrupted trade between England and the Continent, forcing the kingdom to develop self-sufficient agriculture and industry, as well as a modern financial infrastructure capable of subsidizing foreign military campaigns. The establishment of a central bank, national debt, lotteries, and recoinage in the 1690s encouraged a new generation of adventurers to seek profit through instruments like the joint-stock company. Defoe, who went bankrupt during these heady years farming cats to make perfume and financing marine salvage expeditions, acknowledged the benefits and perils of projects. His Essay upon Projects (1697) distinguishes between ventures that “tend to the Improvement of Trade, and Employment of the Poor, and the Circulation and Increase of the publick Stock of the Kingdom,” and those
