The Wreckage of Intentions. David Alff
Bellers), or by inheriting rural estates (Reynell). Few seem to have been exceedingly rich or completely destitute, and therefore most showed some desire to make money. Projectors were seldom as penurious as their critics suggested, though a number, like Roger Coke and Daniel Defoe, faced the prospect of debtor’s prison in the wake of failed ventures.26 Several seventeenth-century improvers attended Oxford or Cambridge, many training to become physicians or lawyers. A few, such as Barbon and Richard Weston, were educated at Leiden and Utrecht and in Flanders, and like Yarranton, drew on their experiences abroad to propose improvements in England.
Yarranton would stress his involvement with the political and economic affairs of a realm he proposed to modernize. But he was a veritable outsider compared to other projectors who were elected to Parliament (Barbon, Mackworth, Child) and fellows to the Royal Society (John Houghton, Chamberlen). A small number of projectors were knighted, including Humphrey Mackworth, Hugh Chamberlen, and, to Defoe’s lasting chagrin, the shipwreck explorer William Phips.27
A projector’s proximity to power often shaped what (s)he sought through writing. Some proposed schemes in order to obtain governmental office, such as Reynell, who had designs on joining the Board of Trade, and Samuel Fortrey, who succeeded in becoming Clerk of the Deliveries of the Ordnance seven years after his England’s Interest and Improvement (1663) appeared. Others wrote pamphlets to advance business interests. Nicholas Barbon’s advocacy of free trade and house construction would complement the insurance office he opened in 1680. Mackworth wrote an improvement tract, England’s Glory (1694), before later organizing the joint-stock company Mineral Manufactures of Neath (1713). Other projectors insisted that they wrote out of a genuine interest in the public good, and there is often little evidence to refute these claims. What John Evelyn hoped to gain from his anti-air-pollution pamphlet Fumifugium (1661), or Moses Pitt sought to make from his prison reform treatise The Cry of the Oppressed (1691) is probably irreducible to profit and fame.
As a former republican official, for-hire engineer, and energetic pamphleteer, Andrew Yarranton personified all these motivations. His fraught career in projects epitomizes the difficulty of existing within a society while trying to change it. His England’s Improvement was one proposal “amongst others” but foregrounded projection’s universal need for authorial self-fashioning, whose terms and stakes we can grasp only by turning to Yarranton’s own words.
Possessing Dutch Progress
The first word of Yarranton’s title, England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (Figure 1), designates England as either an object or agent of improvement. The possessive adjective “England’s” implies that the kingdom can receive improvement, that its lands and people could be put to better use. The word alternatively endows England with the capacity to pursue improvement, to enhance itself through collective action. What England has, according to Yarranton, is a series of deficiencies and the power to remedy them. The pamphlet’s textual content belongs to one author, “Andrew Yarranton, Gent.”; but its enacted outcomes will become the entire nation’s grammatical possession. Improvement denotes both a pursuit and a destination, a program for controlling the future and an attribute of the future itself. Yarranton forges consensus support for his plans by addressing England as a single, unified entity in the style of William Carter’s England’s Interest Asserted (1669), Samuel Fortrey’s England’s Interest and Improvement (1673), and Roger Coke’s England’s Improvements (1675). Like Yarranton’s England’s Improvement, these works pledge to salvage new utility from existing assets; their titles entitle England to unreaped benefits while imagining the nation as a “seamless whole.”28
Figure 1. Title page of Andrew Yarranton’s England’s Improvement by Sea and Land. RB 148563, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
England’s Improvement divides the proleptic possession of future value into discrete activities. “By Land,” improvement entails harvesting timber to build ships, making shallow rivers navigable, fireproofing cities, employing poor subjects, and supplying London with “Bread and Drink.” These measures would strengthen England “by Sea” by stimulating exports, relieving debt, and positioning the kingdom to surpass its Continental trade rival, the Dutch Republic, “without fighting.” Yarranton introduces these measures through infinitive sentence fragments—to out-do, to pay, to set at work, to prevent—phrases that seem to insist on a course of action without assigning that action an agent. The paradoxical injunction “To Pay Debts without Moneys,” for instance, arrests readers without specifying a payer or payee. Yarranton’s ambiguity is deliberate. His title evokes outcomes without specifying means to lure readers into the pages of the pamphlet, where he describes at great length concrete solutions to the kingdom’s most debilitating problems.
“People confess they are sick,” observes Yarranton in a prefatory letter; “trade is in a Consumption, and the whole Nation languishes.”29 By portraying England as a victim of consumptive disease, England’s Improvement proposes itself as a bill of treatments, and its author as caregiver to the tuberculin national body politic. England’s lack of vitality stems from dysfunction at home and competition from abroad. First, Yarranton censures his readers for failing to take advantage of “our Climate, the Nature of our Soil, and the Constitution of Both our People and Government,” arguing that temperate weather and mild rule oblige industry.30 The kingdom’s fortunate “our” implies an active “we” who must labor in gratitude for God’s blessings. This sentiment echoes the rhetoric of contemporary improvers whose projects claimed to uncover the “means by which the fertility hidden by God in the soil could be unlocked.”31 “Divine providence” endowed England with “all in the most profitable advantages,” according to Samuel Fortrey.32 Samuel Coke set out to describe “the benefits which may arise to my native Country, from those Natural Endowments wherewith God has adorn’d it above any other.”33 “Great-Britain is acknowledged by all the world to be Queen of the Isles, and as capable to live within it self as any Nation,” argued Reynell.34 Therefore, he reasons, Britons should “add to it and give some advance, by our own Art and Industry.”35 Yarranton likewise portrays improvement as the distinctly English labor of realizing the “unparallel’d Advantages” of a providential birthright.36
The second impetus to improve loomed across the North Sea in the form of the Dutch Republic, a state that came to dominate global trade in the seventeenth century despite lacking England’s prodigious geography. The enterprising Dutch, who built their compact republic on diked polder, fashioned fleets from Norse timber, and secured credit with astounding facility, stoked English envy and puzzlement. “Holland hath not much of its own store,” noted Fortrey, and yet by “industrious diligence” furnish themselves with “whatsoever the world affords and they want.”37 How, asked an incredulous Nicholas Barbon, could such a “little tract of Ground” derive the “great Advantage and Profit that Trade brings to a Nation” at the same time that blessed England languished?38 Fortrey and Barbon express astonishment at Holland’s seeming ability to create “wealth out of nothing” by attracting “goods with the new power of quick sales, easy exchanges, and ready cash.”39
By 1677, Anglo-Dutch rivalry had triggered three “bloody Wars,” in Yarranton’s words, draining conflicts that made English merchants “g[o] by the worst,” while occasioning moments of national humiliation, like the “sad news” of the “Dutch burning our Ships at Chattam.”40 After “spending some time” studying the Dutch Republic’s “Laws, Customs, publick Banks, Cut Rivers, Havens, Sands, Policies in Government and Trade,” Yarranton arrives at the unrousing conclusion that England “could not beat the Dutch with fighting.”41 Holland’s perceived invincibility was partially the result of marine topography: the shoal-lined Frisian archipelago blocked English fleets from pursuing Dutch ships. Where the Dutch Republic’s shallow-bottomed fluyboats could navigate to port during sieges, English ships were forced to anchor in the