The Draining of the Fens

Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4214-4330-0
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 416 Seiten, Format (B × H): 154 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 590 g

Reihe: Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ash, Eric H.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Technische Wissenschaften Technik Allgemein Technikgeschichte
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Feuchtgebiete, Sümpfe, Moore
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Dedication

Table of Contents

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Introduction. The Unrecovered Country: Draining the Land, Building the State

Part I: Popular Politics, Crown Authority, and the Rise of the Projector

Chapter 1: Land and Life in the Pre-Drainage Fens

Chapter 2: State Building in the Fens, 1570-1607

Chapter 3: The Crisis of Local Governance, 1609-1616

Chapter 4: The Struggle to Forge Consensus, 1617-1621

Part II: Drainage Projects, Violent Resistance, and State Building

Chapter 5: Draining the Hatfield Level, 1625-1636

Chapter 6: The First Great Level Drainage, 1630-1642

Chapter 7: Riot, Civil War, and Popular Politics in the Hatfield Level, 1640-1656

Chapter 8: The Second Great Level drainage, 1649-1656

Epilogue. The Once and Future Fens: Unintended Consequences in an Artificial Landscape

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Ash, Eric H.
Eric H. Ash (GROSSE POINTE WOODS, MI) is a professor of history at Wayne State University. He is the author of Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England.

Eric H. Ash is a professor of history at Wayne State University. He is the author of Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England.