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The Draining of the Fens - Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,381
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The Draining of the Fens - Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Hardcover)
Series: Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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The draining of the Fens in eastern England was one of the largest
engineering projects in seventeenth-century Europe. A series of
Dutch and English "projectors," working over several decades and
with the full support of the Crown, transformed hundreds of
thousands of acres of putatively barren wetlands into dry, arable
farmland. The drainage project was also supposed to reform the
sickly, backward fenlanders into civilized, healthy farmers, to the
benefit of the entire commonwealth. As projectors reconstructed
entire river systems, these new, artificial channels profoundly
altered both the landscape and the lives of those who lived on it.
In this definitive account, historian Eric H. Ash provides a
detailed history of this ambitious undertaking. Ash traces the
endeavor from the 1570s, when draining the whole of the Fens became
an imaginable goal for the Crown, through several failed efforts in
the early 1600s. The book closes in the 1650s, when, in spite of
the project's enormous difficulty and expense, the draining of the
Great Level of the Fens was finally completed. Ash ultimately
concludes that the transformation of the Fens into fertile farmland
had unintended ecological consequences that created at least as
many problems as it solved. Drawing on painstaking archival
research, Ash explores the drainage from the perspectives of
political, social, and environmental history. He argues that the
efficient management and exploitation of fenland natural resources
in the rising nation-state of early modern England was a crucial
problem for the Crown, one that provoked violent confrontations
with fenland inhabitants, who viewed the drainage (and accompanying
land seizure) as a grave threat to their local landscape, economy,
and way of life. The drainage also reveals much about the political
flashpoints that roiled England during the mid-seventeenth century
leading up to the violence of the English Civil War. This is
compelling reading for British historians, environmental scholars,
historians of technology, and anyone interested in state formation
in early modern Europe.
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