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

In the mid-1500s, the famed East Anglia “Fens” were not entirely composed of a true “fen” landscape. In reality, the wide stretch of coastal wetlands was marsh closer to the North Sea; one only found peat-rich inland fens the closer one came to the Cambridgeshire uplands. In these wetlands, the Great Ouse, Nene, and Welland rivers met and drained an eighth of the English countryside, creating a watery landscape subject to periodic flooding with rich and diverse plant and animal life thriving on the nourishing silt. Though held in contempt by neighboring uplanders, the fenland dwellers had developed a culture of subdued prosperity, pasturing animals on saltmarsh grass and piecing together a living from the bounty of their ecological circumstances. Hunting, fishing, and gathering of marsh flora for sale in surrounding towns supported a way of life markedly different from other English yeomen. By 1570, this lifestyle, and the ecology that enabled it, was swept up in the broader currents of English social and economic modernization. Casting the Fens as unconscionably wasted potential, and the fenlanders as equally diseased, degraded, and idle, entrepreneurial “projectors” hatched a series of schemes to drain the wetlands, erect structures to control and mitigate floods, and generally increase agricultural productivity (as well as reap handsome rewards in newly-arable land themselves). With royal support, the reclamation of the Fens became a key component of Tudor state-building. The project served the dual function of consolidating political power and extending the centralized state’s influence. In turn, the draining of the “Great Level” came to rhetorically support a malleable legal notion of “commonwealth” exploited by both sides of the English Civil War, where landscape manipulation, which affected the society that dwelt on it, figured prominently in the era’s utopian reform efforts. While the fenlanders violently resisted being stripped of their commons, attempting everything from legal appeal to rioting and sabotage, the projectors, engineers, and investors eventually succeeded in the massive and complete ecological transformation. Though constantly under threat of reversion, the Fens have been so altered that their continued existence today depends on accepting saturation with engineering as a fact of life.

So argues Eric H. Ash, a Wayne State University history professor, in his thoroughly-researched and brightly-written history of the transformation and politics of the English state of the era. The book fills a gap in the project’s historiography for which no dedicated modern monographic study existed. Ash’s comprehensive approach to the social and political aspects of the project is complemented by him being well-versed in contemporary ecological theory, an analytic perspective that yields fresh insight. Ecosystems are constantly in flux; Ash’s description of the fenlanders’ adaptation to the changing environment is a masterful study in historical analysis of environment and society evolving in tandem. In eight chapters divided in two parts, Ash chronologically outlines the beginning conflicts over local landscape governance starting in 1570, tracing the stormy design and construction evolution of the Hatfield and Great Levels through the middle of the seventeenth century. The book closes with a reflective epilogue aptly subtitled “Unintended Consequences in an Artificial Landscape.”

This design and environmental history builds on Ash’s previous work on the rise of expertise in modernity. The projectors, figures who combined aspects of engineer, investor, and visionary, were effective because they could gain allies and convince enablers by representing themselves as possessing knowledge superior to the local landscape inhabitants. Ash documents the havoc caused by the rise of the projectors, particularly to those communities that did not fit within their land valuing system. As a running theme, the projectors, avatars of foreign expertise and capital, consistently disrupted local, ecologically-attuned...