This immensely pleasing and impressive book begins by crisply defining and then explaining a momentous transformation in the political economy of early modern Britain. For nearly two centuries after the accession of Elizabeth, schemes for economic and technological innovation—projecting—were an important factor for economic growth. But over this period, the practice and public acceptance of projecting underwent drastic change.

Against the backdrop of medieval notions about the deadly sin of greed, scandalous rent-seeking behavior by late Elizabethan and early Stuart projectors created a pervasive, negative stereotype of the entrepreneur as huckster. Contemporaries learned to distrust projects as schemes devised to enrich projectors who promoted them as public service. Their projects, which required patents, encompassed a wide range of improving activities that allegedly would reform “abuses,” ameliorate social problems, upgrade infrastructure, and facilitate inventions and new import-substituting ventures. The caustic stereotype of greedy, oppressive entrepreneurship had its apotheosis in “the explosion of printed literature against the projector in the 1640s” (83) and, later, “haunting memories of early Stuart grievances” after the Restoration (209).

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, new practices of projecting gained acceptance. Economic improvements sought by projectors were not pursued by quests for grants of coercive power from the state. Instead, their projects presented public opportunities for investments in plausible inventions and joint stock companies. Based on his 2009 dissertation, Koji Yamamoto develops a key indicator of this change in projecting practice and negative stereotypes by comparing two coterminous peak periods in two databases, one of patents for invention and the other of publications on projecting. After an eruption of abusive patents as an instrument of fiscal policy in the 1630s, references in print to projects and projectors were dominated by the negative trope of “plot/cheat/conspiracy.” In the 1690s, a second wave of patents for invention inspired literature on projecting that described it in neutral, non-pejorative terms. Projecting practices had changed. Change in representations of projecting in print “reflected waves not of monopolies, but of business enterprises and joint-stock companies” (33).

Yamamoto's larger thesis is that this shift in entrepreneurial practice and public trust was the historical link that leads from rent-seeking projectors in the early seventeenth century to Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith. In this account, Yamamoto's analysis proceeds along a track parallel to Max Weber's account of the supersession of a different impediment to the rise of capitalism.

This transformation in practice and trust was neither linear nor inevitable. Instead, in politically violent moments, practices changed as widespread public distrust waxed and waned. After the ferocious backlash against projecting in the 1640s, leading proponents of schemes for economic improvement distanced themselves from discredited practices. Such practices included implausible claims, coercive mechanisms, and invocation of secret knowledge as opposed to open publication of technical details. However, these adjustments did not generate a viable model for an alternative mode of projecting because “there was little clear-cut distinction between profiteering under the veneer of public service and receiving just reward for divulging useful knowledge” (115). Distrust of projectors was too strong. In support of this claim, Yamamoto provides a meticulous case study of a failed project, the Stour River navigation scheme that commenced shortly after the Restoration of Charles II. Despite its mobilization of expertise, the scheme—to make the Stour navigable from Sourbride to the Severn—failed principally because “the distrust of projecting socially and financially affected the credibility of those involved” (174).

After the initial rejection of discredited practices, new practices for projecting emerged from several developments. One was sensitivity of Charles II's government to popular outrage over projecting under the reigns of his father and grandfather. After the Restoration, “projects that required sweeping mechanisms of coercion became far less likely to attract sustained governmental support” (226). In addition, there were more opportunities for improving projects due to “increasing colonial trade and real wages amid a stabilizing population” (225). By 1680, “England's culture of projecting had undergone a significant development” (174), propelled by the rise of the Royal Society as “one of the key institutions for promoting economic and technological projects” (180). This connection arose not only from the Society's promotion of projecting but also from experimental philosophy's utility for a new mode of improving activity. For the new mode of projecting, a prospectus with public information was the analog to gentlemen witnesses in early experimental science: both served to forestall problems of credibility.

By the century's end, the transformation of projecting led to stock markets and modern finance capitalism (229). Effective resolution of the problem of widespread distrust appears in the fact that “the increasing popularity of public subscription to joint-stocks … drew in not only wealthy landed gentlemen … but also investors from across the social strata” (235). Continuity as well as change marks this development. Old rhetoric on service to the public persisted in proposals, albeit without wilder millenarian flourishes. Government-issued patents were important, but these were certifications of credible inventions as opposed to devices of royal fiscal policy. There also were negative stereotypes of evil entrepreneurs, but in place of rent-seekers with abusive power conferred by government, the target of public revulsion was the stock jobber who fleeced investors.

With regard to methods and sources, Yamamoto's book resembles the bullseye of a huge Venn diagram. Its larger intersecting circles include the history of innovation and regulation; elite and popular literary sources; and legal, political, and social history. In smaller circles there is history of science, religious history, the analysis of memory, sociologist Erving Goffman's work on stigma, and more. The out come of these intersections is not heedlessly eclectic but, instead, a persuasively coherent extension and revision of important prior work on economic innovation by Joel Mokyr and Paul Slack. Yamamoto convincingly argues that previous scholarship advances a Whiggish, celebratory account of “English exceptionalism” that greatly underplays obstacles to the rise of “England's culture of progressive improvement” and the contingent developments that surmounted them (16, 18).

This is a magisterial book that should be read not only for its substantive claims but as a methodological model for a deeply nuanced account of seventeenth-century developments.