Taming Capitalism before its Triumph: Public Service, Distrust, and 'Projecting' in Early Modern England

by Kōji Yamamoto

This study examines the darker side of England's culture of economic improvement between 1640 and 1720. It is often suggested that England in this period grew strikingly confident of its prospect for unlimited growth. Indeed, merchants, inventors, and others promised to achieve immense profit and abundance. Such flowery promises were then, as now, prone to perversion, however. This volume is concerned with the taming of incipient capitalism - how a society in thepast responded when promises of wealth creation went badly wrong. It reveals a history of numerous visible hands taming incipient capitalism, a story that Adam Smith and his admirers have long set aside.The notion of 'projecting' played a key role in this process. Thriving theatre, literature, and popular culture in the age of Ben Jonson began elaborating on predominantly negative images of entrepreneurs or 'projectors' as people who pursued Crown's and their own profits at the public's expense. This study examines how the ensuing public distrust came to shape the negotiation in the subsequent decades over the nature of embryonic capitalism. The result is a set of fascinating discoveries. Byscrutinising greedy 'projectors', the incipient public sphere helped reorient the practices and priorities of entrepreneurs and statesmen away from the most damaging of rent-seeking behaviours. Far from being a recent response to mainstream capitalism, ideas about socially responsible business havelong shaped the pursuit of wealth, power, and profit. Taming Capitalism before its Triumph unravels the rich history of broken promises of public service and ensuing public suspicion - a story that throws fresh light on England's 'transition to capitalism', especially the emergence of consumer society and the financial revolution towards the end of the seventeenth century.

368 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 20, 2018

Reviews

[Boone Ayala · Rating 4 out of 5]

RQ: Taming Capitalism seeks to explain the origins of the consumer-oriented, market-driven capitalism that emerged in late 17th century England. "By the late 17th century, England's culture of improvement came to incorporate private desire for gain, comfort, emulation, and consumption as the vital ingredient for increasing national power and profit. Transmutation for generating wealth was not to be effected by the projector's genius alone, but also by adeptly mobilizing people's desires" (23). Put another way: "what is the historical process through which one kind of embryonic capitalism overseen by a monarch came to be replaced by another based in the emerging stock market - one that seems recognizably more modern?" (27).

Thesis:

"A history of projecting suggest that the rich undercurrents of promises and public distrust that Hill detected played a crucial role in this evolution" (27). Yamamoto uses keyword analysis of projecting documents - proposals, pamphlets, petitions - to show that peaks of projecting existed in 17th century England, one in the 1640s and another beginning in the 1680s and continuing until the mid 18th century. Projects emerged in great numbers in times of tribulation - "projects were... promoted as solutions to the problem of early modern governance" (29). Projects under the early Stuarts were monopolistic, grants by the monarch of monopoly rights to some project in exchange for revenues; by the 1690s, this had changed. "The difference between the two short-term peaks of patenting, one in the 1630s and the other in the 1690s, captures the underlying constitutional change: the royal prerogative, which had authorized controversial projects under the early Stuarts, lost much of its grip upon projecting by the end of the 17th century" (38).

The negative perception of the projector - the skepticism of his care for the public good - emerged under the early Stuarts in response to the monopolistic and prerogative-originating projects of that period. "The unprecedented rise of printed attacks against against the projector... was a direct response to the numerous controversial projectors discussed above" (78). Cultural sources (satires, plays, poems, and songs) and political and polemical attacks were central to creating this perception.

"This public distrust of the projector came to condition the promotion of useful knowledge, especially the evaluation of credibility and the practices of collaboration and exclusion in the reforming network" (104). This led to greater experimentation (designed to demonstrate the truth of projector's claims) and to the free dissemination of projecting ideas (so as to avoid appearing like a projector). Distrust impacted all projects, regardless of the eminence of skill of the projector (Ch 4).

This distrust against projectors from the early Stuarts brought about the transformation in projecting culture. "Memories of early Stuart projects and grievances dissuaded the restored monarchy and other vigilant actors from pursuing schemes that required extensive compulsion or coercion. This was how the preference shifted decisively towards mobilizing people's benign desire for emulation, profit, and comfort, a new economic convention that drew squarely on changing attitudes towards human desire, on increasing colonial trade, and on the rising purchasing power of labourers" (174). In a word: popular consumption fueled projecting now, not coercion or compulsion by royal prerogative.

Qs:
1) Distrust vs anger at "creative destruction"