The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England by Eric H. Ash (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England by Eric H. Ash Robert Markley (bio) The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England By Eric H. Ash. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. 296. In his 1704 work The Storm, a text that describes the devastation of the extratropical hurricane that struck southwestern England in November 1703, Daniel Defoe reminds his readers that "'tis not many Ages since these Countries [parts of Norfolk, Cambridge, Suffolk, Huntingdon, Northampton, and Lincolnshire] were universally one vast Moras or Lough, and the few solid parts unapproachable" (G. Strawbridge, 1704, p. 17). Defoe's characterization of the eastern fenlands of England as they existed "not many Ages past" rests on a chain of associations that encouraged his readers to view wetlands with horror. For centuries, the fenlands in eastern England frustrated efforts to extend networks of communication and transportation, as well as legal and financial control over land and people who often resisted metropolitan authority. For Defoe and his contemporaries, the draining of the fens in the seventeenth century remained a milestone of economic and even climatological progress—a large-scale reclamation project that had made the land more fertile and more conducive to good health and had stabilized property relations and extended state authority. Draining the fens, one of the largest engineering undertakings in seventeenth-century Europe, took place over decades and, according to its supporters, demonstrated that private investment in combination with the legal and financial support of the Crown could—at least in theory—remake a malarial-ridden landscape into a verdant, orderly, and profitable countryside. Eric H. Ash's compelling study traces the history of this project beginning in the 1570s, when draining the fens on a massive scale first began to take shape as a policy at Elizabeth's court, as would-be projectors and investors argued that their often-hazy ideas would be an unalloyed boon to agriculture, the sociopolitical order, Crown authority, and commercial development. In providing the first full-length history since H. C. Darby's classic The Draining of the Fens (1940), Ash brings together political, economic, engineering, and environmental history in enlightening ways. By the early 1600s, English and Dutch projectors had displaced cottagers and started digging channels to redirect water flows but experienced as many failures as successes. Ash is particularly adept at describing the complexities of these efforts and their unintended consequences. In the 1650s, the draining of the Great Level of the Fens finally was completed under Cromwell, after much expense, radical disruptions to traditional lifestyles, and a good deal of human suffering. Ash suggests that the persistence of these drainage projects over different regimes and many decades reflects the ideological [End Page 857] and sociopolitical assumptions about agricultural "improvement" that characterize sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attitudes toward wetlands. The ultimate success of projectors in transforming hundreds of thousands of acres into arable land came with myriad sociopolitical, economic, and environmental costs; in turn, these conflicts reflected the larger clash of interests that led to the English Civil War. The great virtue of Ash's study is that its detailed archival research shapes a powerful narrative about the ways that drainage projects disrupted traditional (and what we might now call—with caveats—sustainable) uses of the fenland's resources in the interests of economic profit and assertions of the nation-state's authority. Draining the fens inevitably led to conflicts between inhabitants of these wetland areas and agents of the Crown, provoking political and legal debates about the authority of the Crown to seize land, displace inhabitants, and undertake large-scale engineering efforts without the consent of those who made their living off the land. If the meandering streams and routinely submerged areas of the fens supported abundant wildlife and small-scale livestock operations, they also frustrated the nation-building goal of transforming "one vast Moras" into arable land. The concerns voiced by Defoe about agricultural productivity and profit that were the hallmarks of British efforts to colonize distant lands in North America had their origins in the internal colonization of the fenlands. Ash does...