How landowners, drainage projectors, and investors worked with the
Crown to transform England's waterlogged Fens. 2017 Choice
Outstanding Academic Title 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
flash points 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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