spirit while warning readers that the proposal could serve as an edifice for deceit. His entrepreneurial career and reflective writings exemplify England’s continuing ambivalence toward schemes and their claim on the public imagination.
By the time Defoe died in 1731 projection had become such an obvious, even inescapable approach to forging the future from at-hand resources that there was no longer any need to talk of a “Projecting Age.” The first decades of the eighteenth century saw projects graduate from a volatile release of ambition in response to particular historical circumstances to a reconciliation of resources and possibility that would be routinized and then taken for granted within the writing of governmental ministers, legislators, merchants, scientists, authors, and ordinary subjects. In Georgian Britain, even those like Jonathan Swift who sought to curb the freewheeling energies of improvement schemes often imagined their interventions as projects of a sort. The audacious enterprise that Defoe declared the singular theme of his era in 1697 had, by the time of his death, become a pervading, usually unremarked context for comparing present-day Britain to what it could become.
Whether worthwhile or foolhardy, fiscal or technological, crown-backed or republican, what all these early modern British projects shared was a written plan for action and the possibility of action itself. What I mean by “written plan” is a document, like Designe for Plentie, proposing that certain people do certain things. “Action” signifies the happening of those things through “physical movements” that “extend mind into world,” as Jonathan Kramnick defines it.25 What distinguishes projected action from other forms of action is that it belongs to the future, and thus does not necessarily need to leave behind evidence of its planning. Designe for Plentie prescribes acts of legislation, labor, surveillance, and prosecution, packaged together as a bill of instructions for eliminating famine. But universal orcharding never took hold. No fruit bill came before the Commons. No woodward ever claimed parochial office. All that remains of the defunct Designe is its proposal, an embryonic plan that failed to become anything other than words and desire.
This book claims that even unenacted words mattered to the extent they tested new ways of being a society. Projects could “benefit the world even by their miscarriages,” according to Samuel Johnson, who praised authors for charting original courses in commerce and statecraft no matter how feasible.26 Projection records a thinking through of possibility, even when those possibilities remain ultimately shut. In this vein, it shares with works of early modern natural philosophy a tendency to use hypothetical events and imaginary settings to report on reality. Amos Funkenstein has shown that despite their commitment to empirical witnessing, practitioners of the new science employed counterfactual conditionals to “explain nature even when they do not describe it.”27 A conclusive demonstration of inertia, for example, would require a frictionless, obstruction-free universe, an “unobservable if not downright counter-factual setting.”28 To circumvent the physical limitations of reality, natural philosophers developed imaginary experiments as a “tool for the rational construction of the world,” or as Elizabeth Spiller puts it, they made “fictions function as practices for the production of knowledge.”29
Designe for Plentie tests its food supply scheme in the laboratory of an idealized future, wherein the shining virtues of parochial stewardship and Christian charity illuminate the need for cooperative planning. It creates a fictional world in order to adjust its readers’ “imaging and understanding of reality,” and thereby rally them to political action.30 Similar to utopia—another rhetorical mode that presents “fictional alternatives” to the actual world—Designe’s horticultural vision activates a reform agenda that seeks to “transcend the merely feasible.”31 Imaginative proposals functioned as fictions insofar as they prescribed unreal phenomena through an artifice of rhetorical verisimilitude. It is no coincidence that Defoe’s “Age of Projects” shared the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century with what Catherine Gallagher calls the “rise of fictionality,” wherein a set of “believable stories that did not solicit belief” found conceptual stability and nonfactual credibility in the novel.32 At first glance, projection’s solicitation of trust seems to cross the novel’s program of training readers in “an attitude of disbelief” through its depiction of “gullibility, innocence deceived, rash promises extracted, and impetuous emotional and financial investments.”33 But Gallagher shows how this interrogation of faith cultivates in readers a sense of “cognitive provisionality,” training them to take part in speculative activity in an age when “no enterprise could prosper without some degree of imaginative play.”34 Both novels and project writing invited readers to explore hypothetical worlds for immediate pleasure and the promise of moral or monetary gain.
But projection was distinct from counterfactual science, utopia, and novelistic world making in that it endeavored not just to describe reality or modify behavior, but to make real the precise vision it advanced. Where literary genres serve to “mediate and explain intractable problems,” in Michael McKeon’s famous phrase, the project purports to solve them, or at least to explain away that which makes a given dilemma seem insurmountable.35 Designe for Plentie makes the future constructible through human action precisely by framing itself as stirring prophesy and an implementable plan. In claiming that “such a Project also it is,” the author instructs readers not to dismiss his pamphlet as mere description of what is and could be, but rather to create the very future its language portends.
This book examines the workings of such imperative enterprise and asks how, in the hands of early modern British readers, its former potential for action sometimes materialized, more frequently lapsed, and was usually forgotten. Wreckage of Intentions reads old proposals word for word to investigate the generation of futures that seldom got to exist. My study of visionary schemes and schemers uncovers the strategies of rhetorical persuasion, publication, and embodied action that made projection a unique and controversial cultural practice during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Approaching projects through the language, landscapes, data, and personas that they left behind reveals how writers sought to make proposed endeavor seem plausible in the context of the future, and how such argumentation was (and remains) vital to the functions of statecraft, commerce, science, religion, and literature.
At stake in the study of projection is an understanding of how eighteenth-century authors applied their faculties of imagination to achieve finite goals. The functional quality of their writing—their subordination of rhetorical creation to material objectives—may at first appear to discount projection’s literary and intellectual value. Jason Pearl traces a critical preference for escapist utopias over “timidly incremental or naively grandiose” projects on the grounds that the former seem like a more transcendent literary achievement.36 Against this tacit consensus, I find mere “blueprints” to offer an unusually resourceful form of invention refined by the demands of enlisting investors, lobbying politicians, and selling goods—argumentative burdens that weighed less heavily on utopia. If projects seem incremental or naive to us, I argue it is because we are consuming them long past their expiration date. Old proposals confront problems that sometimes no longer exist with solutions that today can seem neither necessary nor desirable. Bound to the expectations of their present, projects often do little to accommodate us belated readers, struggling to grasp the world they sought to remake.
But it is through this disorienting anachronism that projection offers a unique entry point to history. By interpolating present-day readers as residents of early modernity, the proposal invites us to believe in a certain idea of the future that is by now historical (or, more often, counterfactual history). The expired scheme asks us to not know what is to come—to “play the stranger” to a world of enterprise whose fate we already know.37 Rekindling the eighteenth-century projector’s long-extinguished imaginary therefore requires a recalibration of the interpretive practices that we normally bring to bear on this period. Given that the archives of projection generated so much obvious failure, it would be no hard task to pick apart their contents, ridicule their assumptions, disprove their expectations, trace their Whiggism, and unmask their profit motives.
