The Panama Canal, the silkworm, a sugar plantation, the South Sea Bubble, an industrial workschool: they may seem to have little in common, but these, and other disparate interventions from around the globe, share a common epistemology relating knowledge and power in a specific dynamic: the project. A category new to the early modern period that still structures the world around us, the project offers tools for the critical and historical analysis of the large-scale, entangled changes that made modernity. Projects were, to borrow a phrase from Foucault, “technologies of power” that brought together, in a short span of time, many of the social mores, spiritual ends, and epistemic values associated with the modern world. Yet, even as projects claimed to offer new mechanisms for eradicating waste, solving problems, and realizing untold profits by mobilizing peoples and materials, they also engineered large-scale displacement and devastation. The history of projects centers not only the dynamism and ambition but also the violence and ignorance built into economically rationalized visions of the future. For projects were not the laughable schemes many satires suggested; they were integral to global capitalism, epistemic and financial risk-taking, labor exploitation, and environmental degradation. This special issue shows what their impacts were, how projects were configured as forms of knowledge, and how they interrelated with a global landscape of risk and possibility. Addressing their legacies requires critically exploring projects as modes of intervention in the world.

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Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 William Wilberforce, An Appeal to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire, in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1823).2 Wilberforce, Appeal, 26.3 Ibid., 7.4 Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: University Press, 2018).5 Wilberforce, Appeal, 8–9.6 Ibid., 7.7 Ibid., 7–8.

This chapter examines projecting as a source of ideas about self-interest, focusing on projects and figures associated with Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662) during the 1640s and 1650s. With the exception of William Petty (1623–1687), whose economic works post-dated the period, none of the figures discussed here is now regarded as a major economic thinker. Yet their proposals for specific projects of improvement, as well as their engagements with the figure of the "projector," constructed self-interest not only as an object of dissimulation or suppression but also as a good compatible with—and perhaps essential to—the interest of the nation, and as a spring of individual action whose liberation might be a condition or a consequence of scientific-cum-economic improvement.

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The idea of population control is often associated with Malthusian views of scarcity and their twentieth-century political and technological legacies. Though sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thinkers and scientific projectors often described human multiplication in religious—especially biblical and providentialist—terms, they similarly understood population to be constrained by the capacity of limited resources to feed growing numbers, and they sought ways to manage this relationship by “improvements” that combined technological and political innovations in both metropolitan and colonial settings. This article examines how these efforts engaged with population, focusing on several projects relating to food connected with Samuel Hartlib (1660–62) and the Hartlib Circle: Gabriel Plattes’s manifold agricultural improvements for domestic use, Hugh L’Amy and Pierre Le Pruvost’s promotion of colonial trade and fisheries, Cressy Dymock’s corn-setting and “perpetual motion” machines for use in England and Barbados, and John Beale’s promotion of fruit trees and cider. While the Hartlibians developed no theory or doctrine of population and made scant use of demographic quantification, their projects framed the problem of feeding populations central to the management of human multiplication, both as a global, historical concern and as a key problem of colonial empire. They thus shed light not only on the emergence after 1660 of new discourses of demographic quantification, and the background to sustained demographic growth after 1750, but on the origins of population as an object of scientific-cum-political intervention through the medium of food.

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Book Review| February 01 2020 The Economic Thought of William Petty: Exploring the Colonialist Roots of Economics, by Hugh Goodacre The Economic Thought of William Petty: Exploring the Colonialist Roots of Economics. By Goodacre, Hugh. New York: Routledge, 2018. xiv; 247pp. $119.00. Ted McCormick Ted McCormick Concordia University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2020) 52 (1): 197–199. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-8009625 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ted McCormick; The Economic Thought of William Petty: Exploring the Colonialist Roots of Economics, by Hugh Goodacre. History of Political Economy 1 February 2020; 52 (1): 197–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-8009625 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of Political Economy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2020 Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

HistoryVolume 103, Issue 358 p. 874-876 Reviews and Short Notices Britain's Political Economies: Parliament and Economic Life, 1660–1800. By Julian Hoppit. Cambridge University Press. 2017. xxii + 391pp. £22.99. TED McCORMICK, TED McCORMICK Concordia UniversitySearch for more papers by this author TED McCORMICK, TED McCORMICK Concordia UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 17 December 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12696Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume103, Issue358December 2018Pages 874-876 RelatedInformation

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