The Project Itself
The project was a popular vehicle for voicing public opinion and personal ambition in early modern Britain. Its writings fashioned distinctive rhetorics of persuasion that migrated into some of the era’s most popular and canonical literature. Its proposals index a world of defunct possibility that shapes and shadows histories of the real. And yet, the project is hard to grasp as a distinct, history-bearing idea. The word can feel less like a salient topic than a mere topical container—the context for discourse rather than its matter. Despite its breadth of usage and colorful history, “project” has failed to achieve the status of a cultural keyword or enduring episteme.71 Why is this?
Part of what makes projects so hard to track is that action in potential is ephemeral. Many plans anticipated becoming real, but most remained fantasy. While Designe for Plentie imagined prodigiously, it failed to fashion anything beyond the matter of a pamphlet. Visiting its universally planted world today requires a willingness to veer off the course of empirical history to engage with the counterfactual world that the author imagined. Designe’s instructions form just one unenacted proposal among thousands of obsolete plans for poor relief, academies for women, vineyards in Cambridgeshire, fisheries in the North Sea, and a host of newly invented domestic goods. Other projects, such as those related to New World settlement, engendered more striking triumphs (and telling debris).72 Still other schemes left nothing except for passing accounts of their expired potential.73 When a select few ventures managed over time to establish institutions in fields like experimental science, banking, and postal delivery, their project status—their former ability to come or not come into being—might be forgotten, allowing once-uncertain endeavor to harden into the empirical fact of achievement.74 Successful enterprise sometimes spawned imitation or ramified into subsidiary schemes whose authors reckoned new sets of contingencies by taking for granted the improvements that came before them. The project remains elusive today because it is always turning into something else—including the origin of further projecting—or into nothing at all.
Confounding matters is the fact that proposal authors, who were aware of projection’s stigma, referred to their labors by “other termes of Art,” like “invention,” “improvement,” and “public works.”75 In so doing, they facilitated the absorption of their ventures into the respectable status quo they set out to reform. For example, the early modern drainage of Anglian fenland began as a string of faltering projects before it eventually rendered a landscape so dry and full of farms as to conceal these past struggles and enfold itself into grand narratives of progress, reclamation, and modernization. Jeremy Bentham identifies as a project anything that ever made England “more prosperous than at the period immediately preceding it” and attacks Adam Smith for not acknowledging how England benefited from once-degraded schemes.76 Remembering old projects as “projects”—that is, as writing and potential action—therefore means assessing the cultural impact of a broad spectrum of enterprise, from ventures that flopped to ones so proficient in creating the conditions of the future, even our present, that it is hard to recall how these pursuits were ever under development or in doubt.
Another obstruction to seeing the “project itself” arises from presumptions built into our methods of humanities research. The bounding of scholarship by disciplinary field and time period tends to highlight the contents of specific schemes while taking for granted the availability of the project as a vehicle by which ideas for future action circulated and materialized. Today it is common to see “project” fused prepositionally to finite subject matter—husbandry projects of the Elizabethan era or forestry projects from the Restoration. But it is rare that someone confronts projection decoupled from its discrete implementations the way writers like Defoe, Bentham, and Smith did.77 Aided by technologies of database keyword searching, we are well outfitted to latch onto taggable particulars of the past but can struggle to grasp structures of thought so massively pervading and deeply embedded within society that they go unnoticed, even unnamed. Projects, in their ubiquitous invisibility, both overwhelm and escape the digital tools and specialized modes of scholarly thought we expect to presence them.
The experience of calling for Designe for Plentie at a rare books library illustrates the dissonance between the self-conception of old proposals and modern efforts to classify them. Designe’s author refers to his work as a project (as well as a design and assay), but the English Short Title Catalogue files this pamphlet under the subject headings “Fruit trees—England—Early works to 1800” and “Food supply—England—Early works to 1800.” These textual strings indeed touch on the central concerns of this Commonwealth orcharding pamphlet. But they also reflect habits of organization that overlook Designe’s self-understanding as an instrument of social reform. The proposal’s will to remake the world through trees is absent from these tags. This means furthermore that the search string “project” will likely miss Designe, which includes the term only a few times in its body text, as well as many other projects that, for various reasons, did not identify as such.
Topic-driven bibliography captures a mass of empirical particulars but does not return the project as an indexable concept. The taxonomies that organize our archives have made it difficult to see that even projects with dissimilar contents can share the same formal features and self-conception. Like Watt’s realism, which “does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it,” what made project writing recognizable was not its coverage of a particular subject, but rather its methods for locating future solutions to various needs.78 The privileging of searchable content over pervasive forms has given projection a fragmentary critical literature in which “project” means different things to different readers. Projects were agro-industrial initiatives in the Tudor and Jacobean period for Joan Thirsk.79 Novak associates them with the “age of Newton and Newtonism or the ‘Augustan Age.’”80 Christine Gerrard regards projectors as speculators who “floated shares in new enterprise on a stock market.”81 John Brewer confers the title on civilians who put forward unsolicited proposals for government reform and “usually received short shrift from the incumbent officials they sought to displace.”82
These definitions treat projection as the offshoot of historical developments in agriculture, experimentation, finance, and court patronage. Taken alone, none can show how “project” performed multiple services for speakers ranging from Renaissance courtiers and Commonwealth sequestrators to Restoration experimenters and Hanoverian bureaucrats—to anyone who wanted to categorize and shape perception of these figures. To deny the project’s own historical subjecthood hazards underestimating what one Caroline writer called the “protean” character of the projector, who disguised himself as “a decaied Merchant, a broken Citizen, a silent Minister, afore-judgd Atturney, a busy Solicitor, a cropeard Informer, a pickthank Pettifogger, or a nimble pated Northern Tick.”83 Wreckage of Intentions seeks to recover the wide range of personas and pursuits that belonged to the early modern word “project” by connecting ideas of enterprise scattered across scholarly fields ranging from the history of science and technology to theories of state formation to studies of Restoration theatrical satire. Retrieving projects beyond their idiosyncratic deployments entails scanning the horizons of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century print culture for the traces of old enterprise, and then scrutinizing those traces. Methodologically, I alternate between what Brad Pasanek calls the desultory reading of “page images and passages indexed and made available in large electronic text collections,” and minute examination of how particular proposals and their critiques solicited readers.84 This negotiation of reading up close and at a distance, of individual works in the context of many, can begin to draw the project out of history and restore the singularity it possessed therein.
A final impediment to seeing the project as a distinct history-bearing concept—as well as a stimulus to do so—is the difficulty of establishing critical distance from a subject that is inescapably