them with Restoration England’s universal desire for betterment.
One man who exemplified the tensions between the scandalizing ambition of projection and the respectable compromises of improvement was Andrew Yarranton. A native of Worcestershire, Yarranton applied his relentless energies to cutting canals, forging iron, making linens, and marketing clover as a fodder crop. He lobbied for England to establish a land registry, observed German tinplate manufacturing, and studied Dutch mercantile policy. For his innovations in industrial planning and finance, Yarranton has been credited as a pioneering navigations engineer, an early modern railroader, and even the inventor of political economy.11 But when Charles Stuart stepped ashore at Dover Beach in 1660, Yarranton was also a veteran of Cromwell’s army and former sequestrator of royalist land. In 1662 he would be arrested for disobeying his lord lieutenant and later was accused of plotting to overthrow the king. Like his contemporary projector-improver Carew Reynell, who fruitlessly pursued patronage appointments, Yarranton struggled to keep pace with his age and so went about imagining a future that would vindicate his beliefs and talents.
This future found fullest expression in Yarranton’s England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (1677), a 216-page pamphlet that claimed to “chal[k] out the Way” for England to secure and strengthen itself during an “unsteady Age.”12 Yarranton’s tract indeed charts a new direction for English society through a series of projects, though the image of a chalk line belies the work’s great length, complexity, and confusion. England’s Improvement consists of prose paragraphs, dialogues, letters, legislation, maps, and diagrams. It addresses topics ranging from land banking and forestry to firefighting, factory management, grain storage, and naval strategy, sometimes breaking off discussion of one subject to circle back to another.13 Yarranton’s frenetic display of knowledge makes England’s Improvement a mesmerizing but wooly case study in projection and improvement, a bricolage transformation of professional fluency into persuasive resource. England’s Improvement was one proposal “amongst others” of the 1670s as Yarranton himself noted, but its length, digressiveness, and confessed incompletion both invite and embarrass systematic explanations of how project writing worked.14
Paul Mantoux calls England’s Improvement a “curious book in which were jumbled together the observations, plans and dreams of [a] whole life with a host of new and daring ideas.”15 Sifting through this “jumble” of dreamscapes and self-promotion reveals two recurrent themes: Yarranton’s desire to ingratiate himself to the Stuart government that once made him an outlaw, and his anticipation of a world of merchant power, central banking, and land capitalization that would ultimately divert power from the crown, eventually rendering its holder inconsequential to debates over the national economy. These contradictory ambitions—to participate in and outlast Restoration society—compelled Yarranton to develop a rhetoric of persuasion that could smooth over political difference, including his own vexation with the state. Project writing provided him with a set of argumentative conventions for framing futuristic desire as disinterested advice, and for envisioning an alternative world in which the way “chalkt out” is acknowledged as the only viable path for moving society forward.
By approaching Yarranton’s schemes as acts of writing, this chapter challenges material-bound definitions of the term “project” coined by economic historians. Joan Thirsk’s much-cited formulation equates “project” with a “practical scheme for exploiting material things.”16 While some projects proved capable of moving matter, many others were completely infeasible. Daniel Defoe considered the Tower of Babel the quintessential project, “too big to be manag’d, and therefore likely enough to come to nothing.”17 Projects often originated from nothing as well. That seventeenth-century improvers like Yarranton wrote at all underscores their inability to command “material things” through illocutionary power—projectors proposed enterprise because they lacked the land, money, and muscle to execute it themselves. Their schemes manifest the “wants of some ingenious persons” according to Carew Reynell, an improver and sinecure seeker who associated projecting with desire and privation in the context of his own frustrated career.18 An anonymous author of the 1690s invited Londoners to “Reflect on the vast Number of Projectors in and about this City, how bare-bon’d they are, that is, how few of ’em are Rich?”19 This image of scarcity attributes projects not to practical knowledge but to the hunger of threadbare visionaries.
Projection, as Reynell and Yarranton understood it, was an articulation of want: a voicing of ambition and inventory of deficits. It addressed those equipped to put plans into action (monarchs, parliaments, patrons, and readers in general), even if those addressees rarely moved to execute unsolicited schemes. Even well-received proposals sometimes stimulated nothing beyond the creation of more text. The speaker of the satirical ballad The Nevv Projector; or, The Privileged Cheat (1662) boasts of his “protection,” a certificate granting him security from competing inventors and immunity from criminal charges.20 Self-satisfied with his possession of this document, the projector shows no inclination to invent anything. Thomas Brugis likewise dismisses projection as the generation of “petitions” and “references” to “procure a Patent,” writing empowered to legitimate writing.21 Brugis and the balladeer reduce projects to their illusive textuality, a dissembling rhetoric whose point is to aggrandize the author while deferring action in the world.
England’s Improvement was no mere piece of patent graft or stockjobbing. To the contrary, its words convey the complex experiences of an author who struggled to participate in Stuart culture while imaginatively reworking that society to accommodate his ambition. How England’s Improvement conceives itself as improvement’s instrument while defying projection’s stigma is a question of language that we can answer only by examining the text itself. A close reading of Yarranton’s proposal reveals a projector more deliberative and self-questioning than the feckless opportunist Brugis implicates. His persona, moreover, reflects a world of Restoration scheming governed by a broader range of motives and attitudes than antiproject satirists were typically willing to acknowledge. However, the preponderance of skeptical attacks on new enterprise can obscure this complexity, making it difficult to retrieve the actual projector from the scandal that swirled around his title: the historical actor seems always hidden behind literary caricature.
Indeed, for all the fanciful origin myths conferred on projectors, there have been few serious attempts to explain their existence in relation to actual events and institutions. Thomas Macaulay made one such attempt. His History of England (1848) dates the rise of projection to the years 1660–88, when the growth of commercial wealth outpaced the opening of investment opportunities in land, banks, and joint-stock companies. The projector, Macaulay concluded, was the “natural effect” of “redundant capital,” someone who identified conduits for money otherwise “hidden in secret drawers and behind wainscots.”22 Adam Smith also attributed projectors to financial imbalance. He scorned them as the offspring of high interest rates, which discouraged “sober” investment while inspiring rash ventures by “prodigals and projectors” willing to borrow on usurious terms.23 Smith cites Peruvian mines, national lotteries, and John Law’s Mississippi Company as conspicuously “unprosperous projects.”24
Writing of his own age (and of himself), Daniel Defoe identified the quintessential projector as a merchant who pursued new sources of income between 1688 and 1697, when the War of the Grand Alliance disrupted trade with the Continent. He finds the projecting spirit strongest in those stymied traders who “prompted by Necessity, rack their Wits for New Contrivances, New Inventions, New Trades, Stocks, Projects, and any thing to retrieve the desperate Credit of their Fortunes.”25 Defoe would subsequently broaden this finite definition to include anyone who had ever planned, promoted, built, invented, or reformed something for personal gain or society’s advantage, beginning with Noah’s ark. Defoe’s “Age of Projects” referred both to the wartime improvisations of late seventeenth-century merchants, and the recurrence of industrious behavior throughout all human history.
Macaulay
