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 and Smith conceive of projectors as the mechanism and by-product of economic forces. Defoe also circumscribes the agency of proposers by stereotyping them either 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