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Introduction

What Is a Project?

In 1652, an anonymous London pamphlet proclaimed the end of famine. The twenty-four-page Designe for Plentie reasoned that England could secure “food in the time of want” by forcing its landholders to plant twenty apple, pear, walnut, or quince trees on every “five pounds per annum” of arable soil.¹ According to this treatise, a law for compulsory arboriculture would restock the Commonwealth in the wake of civil wars that ruined tillage and emptied larders.² “Woodwards” would patrol nurseries, fine defaulters, and schedule “common dayes” when parishioners would harvest the trees.³ These statutory labors would supply produce, timber, firewood, and juice, which could be fermented into cider. “Universal plantation” promised to barrel so much cider that England could stop brewing beer, a beverage that devoured bread barley while seeding “drunkennesse, disorder, and dangerous plots.”⁴ Fruit groves would transform “waste and wilde places” into a veritable “Garden of God” that could fill stomachs and dazzle eyes.⁵ Beauty, abundance, civility, and even a taste of prelapsarian bliss all seemed within the grasp of this single law.

Despite its euphoric imagery and breathless reasoning, Designe for Plentie concedes that its vision may not materialize. The author bemoans the “sluggishnesse” of his countrymen, likening them to a cat who hungers for fish, “yet her foot in water will not weat.”⁶ He simultaneously fears detractors who would dismiss communal orcharding as a “vain and trifling” notion, a specious enterprise unworthy of state support.⁷ To shake apathy and forestall censure, Designe characterizes itself as a practical measure for the benefit of all Commonwealth citizens: “we have thought it our dutie to present an Assay of Plenty, which we call (A Designe or Project for Plenty) yet not a project of any private advantage to us; but of publique good and plenty unto this Nation.”⁸ Designe anchors its self-justification to three nouns—assay, “designe,” project—that in the seventeenth century denoted both kinds of writing and modes of action. “Assay” frames the fruit scheme as a composition that subjects propositions to trial in the spirit of Montaigne’s essai. The author distinguishes his “try” at advancing the “publique good” from venal pursuits of “private advantage,” fashioning Designe as a tested article of national improvement rather than a vehicle for personal gain. “Designe,” the first word of the title, gives the impression of an elegant plan combining forethought and reason. The pamphleteer claims selfless motives and painstaking methodology to make credible his glimpse into future plenty.

The final term is “project.” Given its position behind the conjunction or, “project” at first sounds like the mere complement and trailing echo of “designe.” But then five words later “project” returns to displace “assay” and “designe” both: the “Assay 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 “fram’d by subtle Heads … to bring People to run needless and unusual hazards.”²⁴ Defoe celebrated the era’s projecting 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. In short, I could bring to bear the full forces of ideology critique to uncover projection’s submerged commitments and presumptions of mastery. And when it is illuminating, I do just this. But more often, what this book attempts is not the critique of projects, but rather the revival of their former possibility by reimagining what once was dreamt as a sign of that culture’s understanding of itself and its capacity to change. Mine is a hermeneutics of salvage that gathers historical evidence in order to reanimate old enterprise. What this resuscitation contributes to eighteenth-century studies and culture studies more broadly is a demonstration of how to think with the past’s inadvertent posterity in the moment it tried to build an unknowable here-to-come that we are used to viewing through hindsight.

The specific past futures that I study originated between 1660 and 1730, a period when “project” retained its old associations with Caroline monopolists and parliamentary state building while amassing new connotations derived from discourses of science, finance, exploration, and technology. I argue that it was during these decades that projects became ubiquitous, assuming a foundational role in the making of Anglophone culture that they did not previously possess or have since relinquished. It was after the Restoration that projection engendered an adequately broad and self-reflexive discourse for Defoe to declare it the spirit of his age. By the 1720s, projects came to seem less like a notorious invention than an unavoidable practice and unquestioned social fixture. While authors continued to debate the value of particular schemes, they were less prone to attacking the project itself as a vehicle for ambition.³⁸ Defoe’s “Age of Projects” never really ended, though we have grown oblivious to its experience over the last three centuries. This book scrapes away the sediment of familiarity to remember the project as an eighteenth-century inheritance we use and inhabit daily.

Projects as Literature

My investigation of projects employs methods of literary inquiry, in particular close reading, genre criticism, book history, performance studies, and historicist analysis. Project writing belongs to the domain of rhetorical and literary criticism, I argue, because it attempts to make worlds out of words, words with the potential to remake the actual world. Borrowing the terms of structural linguistics, we can understand projecting as an act of signification in search of a referent. Until the moment that action is conjured out of language, when a proposal either becomes fact or burns out the fuel of its hopes, the project resides neither in nor outside of the material reality it would re-create. Bruno Latour equates this limbo stage with fiction in Aramis, a postmortem investigation of a twentieth-century project to build an automated transit system in Paris. “A technological project is a fiction,” he explains, “since at the outset it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in the project phase.”³⁹ Project for Latour is a mode of expression as well as the “phase” that Aramis inhabited when it hung between implementation and its ultimate scuttling.

As a discipline that knows its way around fiction, literary studies is well suited to grasp the imaginary ontology of projects that existed in made-up stories, fleeting fabrications, and predictions later proven false. Scholars of literature are also trained to recognize how arguments, like those made by projectors, could be cunning and self-aware. Though few of the proposals I have read display belletristic mastery, many employ conceits, modes of emplotment, and perspectival shifts that we have come to associate with poems, novels, and drama. Even some of the period’s most prosaic pitches for land banking and clover cultivation recycled passages from Virgil and staged dialogues between made-up discussants. They fawned over patrons in dripping panegyric and burst with dedicatory puff made of heroic couplets. Although most projects never became pleasing aesthetic objects, many at least sought to gratify the tastes of culturally literate readers.

The formal challenge of making unreal things seem real, or at least realizable, burdened project proposals with two incongruous missions: to deliver a believable report of practical ideas and to provoke readers with revelation. Proposals likened themselves to established enterprise at the same time they strove to appear fresh, even altogether newfangled. On the one hand, projects could not be “bright ideas appearing out of the blue” as Joan Thirsk observes, but instead “clustered in places where facilities already existed to give the enterprise a promising start.”⁴⁰ In this vein, Defoe presented a project to renovate England’s deteriorating highway system as an example of what Maximillian Novak calls the “rediscoveries of ancient devices.”⁴¹ Defoe summons memories of Britain’s Roman colonizers, excellent road makers who built a durable network of stone causeways across the island, to shame officials into renovating the kingdom’s rutted and mire-prone dirt tracks. His plan entailed the reclamation of a neglected legacy rather than a dauntless adventure in new public works.

On the other hand, projects had to offer an unthought-of solution to persistent trouble. They needed to break with tradition to position themselves as unique interventions—as writing that outsmarted a problem’s existing proposal literature. Like the eighteenth-century prose form that came to exemplify novelty, so much so that it derived its name from that word, project writing sought to be “critical, anti-traditional, and innovating.”⁴² These are the words of Ian Watt, who endows the novel with narrative procedures that conveyed “truth to individual experience,” an individual “free from the body of past assumptions and traditional beliefs.”⁴³ But unlike novels, which recorded past events, it was a view of the future that project proposals tried to make realistic. In pursuit of what we might call future realism, the projector surfaces inherited assumptions about society and its management. This exfoliation becomes credible through its ability to seem like disinterested testimony. The fictional qualities of proposals authorized projectors to guide readers through future prospects by inscribing such hypothetical events within “some ‘reality’ that is cut off from the actual historical continuum.”⁴⁴

Project writing uses distinct rhetorical conventions for visualizing the future as the direct result of present action. In promoting an as-yet unrealized vision, the proposal Designe for Plentie equates civic virtue with delight in nature, likens stewardship to statecraft, and even suggests that orcharding will play a consequential role in man’s redemption as it did in his fall. These devices help the author bridge the temporal and modal chasm between a forthcoming paradise of fruit and the moment of postbellum worry in which it was conceived. The challenge of suturing an indicative present to a subjunctive future forced projectors to become nimble rhetoricians. A Designe for Plentie warrants close reading not just for its provocative recommendations, but for its use of language to create belief.

Projection also invites literary analysis because so much of its historical evidence is contained within writing we understand as “Literature” with a capital “L”—poems, plays, novels, and songs. Projectors’ representations of the future engrossed a variety of authors in the late 1600s and early 1700s, whose creations usually illuminated the fissures between the conception and realization of schemes. Jane Barker’s Galesia declares in response to the sudden death of her suitor, Brafort, “human projects are meer Vapours, carry’d about with every Blast of cross Accidents.”⁴⁵ Milton’s Beelzebub upbraids the Congress of Pandemonium for “projecting peace and war” in book 2 of Paradise Lost.⁴⁶ Galesia characterizes courtship projects as the trifle of indifferent fate. Beelzebub perceives how oratorical projects license idleness, a want of the very action they endorse. The term, for Barker and Milton, implies a lacking response to grave ordeal.

Authors relished making a stock fool of the harebrained and vainglorious projector. Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704) presents Lord Peter, a “projector and virtuoso” who schemes to purchase continents, cure splenetic worms, and establish “a Whispering-Office, for the Publick Good and Ease of all such as are Hypochondriacal, or troubled with the Cholick.”⁴⁷ Two decades later, Swift’s Gulliver would visit the Academy of Projectors, where he witnessed experimenters scheming to extract sunlight from cucumbers, weave garments from cobwebs, and transform excrement into food.⁴⁸ Gulliver’s experiences at Lagado comport with Alexander Pope’s description of an even more ludicrous institution, the court of Dullness in The Dunciad, overrun by “wild enthusiasts, projectors, politicians, inamoratos, castle-builders, chemists, and poets.”⁴⁹ That Pope places projectors in the company of poets within a poem draws attention to the fixation of both figures on illusory outcomes and writing’s potential complicity in the denial of reality.

Projectors routinely paraded across the seventeenth-century stage in comedies and masques either as self-deluding dimwits or calculating villains. The chief antagonist of Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass (first performed in 1616) is Meercraft, a projector who plies his victims with schemes to manufacture leather gloves from dog skin, distill wine from raisins, and drain the Great Fen. Meercraft’s name puns on his prospective activities (“mere” in the British sense of “lake,” and thus also “lake craft”) and on his embodiment of empty artifice (“merely craft”). The protagonist of Richard Brome’s The Court Beggar (1653) is an aspiring projector, Andrew Mendicant, who invests in schemes to monopolize peruke sales, tax sartorial accessories, and construct a “floating Theatre” out of Thames barges.⁵⁰ John Wilson’s 1665 play The Projectors targets the Royal Society for defrauding its patrons with unworkable experiments. Wilson’s play features a “projecting knight,” Sir Gudgeon Credulous, and a diabolical schemer, Jocose, who seduces him with the promise of fictitious whirligigs to drain the sea, devices to “stop up the Rivers,” and a “Horse-Wind-Water-Mill.”⁵¹

In eighteenth-century novels, an itch for projects could also afflict more complex literary personas: not projector caricatures, but rounded protagonists who also happened to project. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe reflects that while managing a plantation in Brazil, “my head began to be Full of Projects and Undertakings beyond my reach; such as are indeed often the Ruine of the best heads in Business.”⁵² Crusoe subsequently abandons his tobacco fields to sail for Guinea, where he has planned to buy slaves and increase his estate. This luckless journey ends in shipwreck on an island off Trinidad, where Robinson embarks on new “Projects and Designs” of survival, including his ultimate “Project of a Voyage to the Main.”⁵³ Projects for Crusoe epitomize both the dangers of overreaching one’s station and the virtues of self-reliance in the face of danger. His adventures reflect Defoe’s ambivalence toward projects, which he concluded were as likely to bring about “publick Advantage” as “needless and unusual hazards.”⁵⁴

Samuel Richardson took a darker view of projection in novels that punish those who scheme to shape the conditions of their being. Pamela Andrews conjures “designs,” “stratagems,” “enterprises,” “plots,” “contrivances,” and “projects” to escape Mr. B’s advances, which she terms “wicked Projects for my Ruin.”⁵⁵ She calls her plan to flee B’s Lincolnshire estate by faking suicide and scaling the garden wall a “projected Contrivance.”⁵⁶ Like Crusoe, Pamela conspires against a “ruin” that is the result of projects, not her own, but rather B’s lustful designs. Unlike Defoe, Richardson’s didactic plot forecloses on intended action: Robinson eventually reaches the mainland and returns to Europe—if not in the way he originally envisioned—but the bolting Pamela retreats when confronted by two grazing cows she mistakes for possessed bulls. Pamela struggles to escape entrapment; she attempts but cannot effect her liberation from external forces. In a tragic case of captivity, Clarissa Harlowe laments her subjugation to the plans of her family and suitors when she begs “that I may not be sacrificed to projects, and remote contingencies,” but she succumbs to Lovelace, who exclaims that “success in projects, is every thing.”⁵⁷ One person’s scheme supplies another’s contingency according to Richardson, who makes “project” encompass both acts of heinous privilege and the struggle to withstand them.⁵⁸

Defoe and Richardson tested the efficacy and wisdom of projects. Other literary authors conceived of their compositions as projects, acknowledging their participation in the speculative economies that resembled those they mocked. Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass appears to condemn project-crazed Jacobean court culture when it renders Meercraft a contemptible villain. But then, in the epilogue, Jonson refers to his play as “a Project of mine owne,” framing his dramatic authorship as its own enterprise of public entertainment, social reform, and profit potential.⁵⁹ Of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Andrew Marvell reflected, “I liked his project, the success did fear.”⁶⁰ David Hume chastises “the vulgar, quacks and projectors” for their “magnificent pretensions” but also touts the virtues of pride for giving “us a confidence and assurance in all our projects and enterprizes.”⁶¹ These “projects and enterprizes” likely included A Treatise of Human Nature itself, which Hume subtitled “an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.”⁶²

Projects in the 1600 and 1700s were both a popular theme in writing and a metaphor for understanding authorship as its own enterprise for accruing fame and righting an imperfect society. But overwhelmingly, literature from this period lends the impression that projects held, in Novak’s words, “a distinctly unsavoury connotation, being associated with unscrupulous schemes for getting money.”⁶³ Therefore, it is crucial to distinguish between critical depictions of projection and actual projects under proposal or in progress. Lagado’s inmates and Lord Peter should not stand in for the self-reflexivity and sophistication of actual projectors, the subtlety of their rhetoric, the diversity of their addressees, and their understanding of the world as unreaped potential. Canonical literature has a tendency to flatten cultures of projection, rendering their authors transparently self-interested if not altogether criminal. In order to historicize rather than uncritically inherit these assumptions, my study keeps projects—proposals and the actions they incited—at the center. It was the temerity of visions like Designe for Plentie’s, I argue, that made projection such a controversial idea in early modern Britain, and an enduring basis for public debate and literary invention.

Projects Against History

The word “project” marks a historical attempt at becoming, an arrival of potential distinct from the stage at which an ambition ultimately succeeds or fails. To see Designe as a project is to return to the moment of its conception, when no one could know for sure what “universal plantation” might do to English soil and society. By accepting the author’s premise that “such a Project it is,” we recognize how this proposal imagined itself as a viable course of action at the moment it circulated. Approaching projects like Designe for Plentie today not as retrospective dead ends (things that did not happen) but rather as once-live opportunities (things that could have happened) compels us to share this uncertainty ourselves by screening what Richard Scholar calls “the hindsight that turns signs of a future story into the origins of the future that is our present.”⁶⁴ In the case of Designe, escaping the trap of anachronism means considering fruit fiats as a conceivable element of the future, even if that future is now past, and we know it bore no fruit.

When read in light of their former potential, old proposals reveal a past in process. These writings can vitalize our conception of history by showing the impact of undertakings that were intended but unachieved. Even fantastical schemes for draining the Irish Channel and raising silk worms in Middlesex challenge what Michael Andrew Bernstein calls the “triumphalist, unidirectional view of history.”⁶⁵ Such teleological perspectives underwrite not only much-questioned “Whig” narratives positing constitutional monarchy as the zenith of British civilization, but also the tendency of eighteenth-century scholars to find in this period the birth and rise of empire, capitalism, the novel, the self, the public sphere, the nation, and enlightenment. It is not my aim to contest claims of origin and upsurge, but to suggest that their preponderance implicates our desire to make the past a history of modernity—to find prefigurations of our ourselves and our experiences in the 1600s and 1700s. This pursuit founders on projection and the many thousands of schemes that failed to produce recognizably modern institutions and practices. While the proposals I examine invariably aspire to progressive ideals (to rise, discover, enlighten), their history is riddled with commercial busts, epistemological cul-de-sacs, and abandoned infrastructure. Projects simultaneously harbored the possibility of improvement and debris. They manifested forward-looking intention but also anticipated a form of wreckage incongruous with the positivist narratives we construct to explain this era and connect it to our own.

The archives of early modern projects reveal a society simultaneously making and unmaking itself through the ongoing generation of chancy schemes. Wreckage of Intentions suggests that this (un)making has a rhetorical form and material history. Failed enterprises encapsulate what Reinhart Koselleck calls “since-superseded future,” a nonexistent temporality that can nonetheless ventilate a past thick with multiple possibilities, including unenacted plans that challenge progressive accounts of human development.⁶⁶ Projects instance since-superseded futurity, indeed constitute one of this imaginary ontology’s most observable units. Old projects reframe the past as an ongoing “present” brimming with former potential. Inhabiting this past is, according to Michael Bernstein, “not merely to reject historical inevitability as a theoretical model. Far more important, it means learning to value the contingencies and multiple paths leading from each concrete moment of lived experience, and recognizing the importance of those moments not for their place in an already determined larger pattern but as significant in their own right.”⁶⁷ Bernstein and Gary Saul Morson use the term sideshadowing to refer to interpretive modes that admit not just “actualities and impossibilities,” but also “a middle realm of real possibilities that could have happened even if they did not.”⁶⁸ This “middle realm,” I suggest, is identical to Latour’s “project phase,” a duration when an aspect of the future can be thought but not yet experienced. Wreckage of Intentions surveys some of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain’s paths untaken or not fully taken. It traces what Herbert Butterfield, archcensor of teleologies, calls the “crooked and perverse … ways of progress,” while rejecting the assumption that progress need always be found (let alone in linear form).⁶⁹ In dwelling on what Morson calls the “presentness of the past,” I propose the project’s evocation of past presentness as a means of unstreamlining the histories we inherit and make.⁷⁰ Old plans enable us to recover history as a scatter plot of lived experiences and to appreciate how each unconstellated moment implied futures that we can recollect and learn from today.

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 central to modern society. Project terminology endures to ubiquity today in the form of client projects, art projects, book projects, housing projects, infrastructural superprojects, and the projects of self-fashioning dramatized in television series like The Mindy Project and Project Runway. The project has become so fundamental to modern ways of life that it has become ungraspably abstract, proliferating almost imperceptibly within entrepreneurial rhetorics and managerial modes of thought, as well as philosophical discourses ranging from Heideggerian ontology and Freudian psychoanalysis to Sartrean existentialism and Marxist definitions of value.⁸⁵ The astonishing versatility of projects is neatly demonstrated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, translators of Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk, who assembled Benjamin’s unfinished reflections under the title—among countless options for English renderings—Arcades Project. This usage appears to signify the work’s incompletion, perhaps even its status as a “blueprint for an unimaginably massive and labyrinthine architecture.”⁸⁶ Benjamin appears to encourage this conception of Passagenwerk by imagining within it a dream city comprising “building plans, street layouts, park projects, and street-name systems that were never developed.”⁸⁷ “Project” signifies both futuristic planning related to the growth of Paris into a nineteenth-century capital, as well as a program for redeeming past opportunity scattered within the “rags” and “refuse” of history.⁸⁸ Like my own project of projects, Benjamin’s reflective collage culls the debris of old possibility for cultural insight—in his case, for evidence of how commerce, technology, and urban development created the conditions for modern bourgeois experience.

Projection’s idiom has proven so resilient that it threatens to impede investigation by conflating the object of study with the instruments of its analysis.⁸⁹ In this vein, Georges Bataille grudgingly conceded that projection had become an insuperable employment of modern philosophers when he described his Inner Experience as a “projet contre projet,” a manifesto for “existence without delay” that ironically (but inevitably) took form as a book project.⁹⁰ Given this problem of immersion, a theoretical goal of this book is to establish the project as an investigable form. In looking back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, I seek to dislodge an aspect of present experience so given we hardly notice it.

The overall goal of my project is to restore the remarkable early modern life of an idea today mired in anodyne ubiquity. The hollowness of modern projects, their signification of everything and thus nothing, is the result of gradual naturalization. The first step toward represencing projects as a touch-stone cultural concept is to return them to the categories of thought and expression in which they existed for authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We should remember that the word “project,” as noun and verb, engendered a distinctive kind of writing in the 1600s and 1700s, as well as a form of print and mode of performance: text, the matter containing it, and embodied attempts to realize its vision.

In this spirit, my chapters confront the project’s conceptual slipperiness by dividing the idea into concrete stages: the articulation, circulation, undertaking, and reception of ideas for new enterprise. Project authors composed persuasive arguments to render their schemes plausible and attractive. They worked alongside stationers to disseminate new proposals through print. They enacted written designs through performances known as undertakings. Finally, these attempts at reforming society stimulated public response. The idea of projects in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain encompassed acts of writing, print, and performance. Therefore, my approach combines techniques of rhetorical analysis, book history, performance theory, and genre criticism to illuminate the multifaceted phenomenon of projection, from some of the era’s most ephemeral schemes to a few of its most enduring.

Chapter 1 shows how projects began as words. It identifies the rhetorical strategies that enabled Andrew Yarranton’s 1677 pamphlet England’s Improvement by Sea and Land to foresee the nation’s perfection through the establishment of a land registry, the dredging of canals, and the building of textile mills. This work employs several signature conventions of projection, including the comparison of a troubled present with better futures, the reconciliation of profit motives with the public good, and the representation of the Dutch Republic as a menacing threat and economic model. It is Yarranton’s occupation and evacuation of different conceits that makes his tract a striking example of how authors justified the work of reforming society. As a former captain in the New Model Army and suspected Presbyterian conspirator, Yarranton used projects to legitimate himself as a moderate reformer fit to voice an Anglican kingdom’s future interest. Close reading of England’s Improvement reveals how an especially resourceful projector manipulated language to solicit readerly belief in his ideas and talents.

Chapter 2 argues that print played a crucial role as an enabling medium of projection. It investigates a series of stationery artifacts generated by Aaron Hill’s star-crossed attempt to manufacture and market beech seed oil in Georgian England. The beech oil venture rose to prominence and then disintegrated between 1714 and 1716, one of many entrepreneurial busts in an era renowned for Agricultural Revolution. Hill’s failed enterprise left a paper trail that included patent petitions, investment tracts, newspaper advertisements, and Tory panegyric. This study in project print culture shows how the material requirements of different documents shaped the experience of projects for authors, readers, and potential participants. In so doing, it intervenes in modern academic debates over the role of mediation in historicist scholarship by asking how nonaction governs the materiality of its proposal and the conditions under which it can be read today. While issues of publication concerned all aspirant industrialists of the early 1700s, beech oil makes a particularly intriguing case study because so many of its founding documents survive, a low attrition due to Hill’s reputation as a prominent poet and playwright.

Recognizing that successful projects eventually needed to become more than paper and ink, my third chapter builds on the insights of performance theory to show how new enterprise was enacted through a process called “undertaking.” This study of projected action concentrates on efforts to drain eastern England’s Great Fen during the middle seventeenth century. Approaching this land improvement enterprise through evidence of its once-embodied labors enables us to ask what can be known about projects once they make the leap from words in pamphlets to bodies toiling on land. This analysis of enactment offers an extended view of the final stages of a project from the vantage not only of its architects, financiers, and victims, but its laborers. The view from the ground—as opposed to the page—reveals how the performance of new enterprise could never follow the straightforward line that its proposal drew.

My final two chapters show how the reception of new enterprise spurred the innovation of eighteenth-century literary forms. Chapter 4 argues that British georgic, a popular mode of poetry that celebrated agricultural tasks like hop picking and sheep shearing, derives its tendency to aestheticize rural ways of life not only from Virgil, as scholars have assumed, but also from seventeenth-century husbandry manuals that taught readers how to undertake improvement projects within the ambit of their own property. I demonstrate that agricultural project proposals, typically undervalued as prosaic and evidentiary, presaged georgic’s survey of a virtuous English heartland to anchor illustrations of domestic prosperity and imperial dominance.

My final chapter argues that projectors played a formative role in the development of prose satire, a literary genre bearing its own commitments to social reform. It turns to the most famous scene of projection in eighteenth-century fiction: the Academy of Lagado in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). While scholars have long argued that the third book of Gulliver’s Travels satirizes specific scientific, financial, and political projects from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I contend that Swift’s Academy of Projectors also critiques the linguistic strategies of projection itself. Drawing on an established literary tradition of antiproject plays and pamphlets, Gulliver’s Travels pastiches popular conventions of proposal writing to demonstrate how even the most misguided ventures could be rendered attractive through the rhetorical dexterity of their authors. For Swift, a perennial opponent of English schemes for Irish improvement, project pastiche offered a mode of subversive mimicry revealing how the certitude of state planners derived from illusory device.

Wreckage of Intentions opens with a vision of plenty. It closes by asking what Daniel Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain can tell us about the afterlife of abandoned enterprise. In the Tour’s third letter, Defoe enters the New Forest of Hampshire and finds there a plot of land he had projected to populate with refugees from the Rhenish Palatine in 1709. This settlement scheme came to nothing, leaving the author to rehearse his once-hopeful plans fifteen years later while walking through the exact wilderness he petitioned to improve. Defoe invests “this place” with foreclosed potential, an example of where an unfinished venture left its imprint on a literary record but not actual land. In assessing the signifying nonmatter of this wilderness, I ask why unenacted projects became an enduring obsession for period writers and hypothesize how such anecdotes could spur cultural historiographies better equipped to accommodate the unreal. I contend that an obsession with projection’s counterfactual histories is not something we impose on the long eighteenth century, but a possibility for salvage inscribed within its former blueprints.