The Cultural Life of Risk and Innovation

Imagining New Markets from the Seventeenth Century to the Present

Chia Yin Hsu, Thomas M. Luckett, Erika Vause

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000195750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

How did "innovation" become something to strive for, an end in itself? And how did "the market" come to be thought of as the space of innovation? This edited volume provides the first historical examination of how innovations are conceived, marketed, navigated and legitimated from a global perspective that highlights contrasting experiences. These experiences include: colonial "projecting" in the Dutch New Netherlands, trust networks in the early US securities market, female investors during the Financial Revolution, life insurance in nineteenth-century France, "bubbles" and trusts in 1920s Shanghai, government regulation of the pre-Revolutionary stock market and the checkered success of today's bit-coin technology. By discussing these diverse contexts together, this volume provides a pathbreaking reconsideration of market and business activities in light of both the techniques and the emotional vectors that infuse them.

Part I
Imagining New Markets

Perils and Desires

1
Dealing With Uncertainty

The Practice of Projecting and the Colony of New Netherland, 1609–1664¹

Eva Brugger

In the summer of 2014 the journal New York History invited a group of young scholars to discuss “The Past, Present and Future of New Netherland Studies.”² The seven researchers, who all worked on different aspects of the history of New Netherland, agreed that most studies of the Dutch colony in the seventeenth century developed a stereotypical narrative, focusing mostly on the failure of the Dutch as colonists and merchants in North America. Danny Noorlander, specialist on the Dutch empire, colonial America, and the Atlantic world, asked the group to consider a new way of thinking. Studies on the history of New Netherland, he asserted, should place the Dutch “in their own time” instead of judging whether the colony failed or not from today’s point of view.³ With this injunction, Noorlander points to a general weakness of early modern history: research interested in the economic and political context of early modern colonial enterprises tends to either judge the history of particular colonies as successful and valuable for the development of worldwide empires or dismiss them as failed colonial ambitions. Consequently, colonial projects that failed due to mismanagement, insufficient supply of food, violent conflicts with indigenous peoples, or difficulties of adapting to a different climate are rarely explored for their own sake. This criticism holds particularly true for studies of the Dutch colonial venture in North America: research either focuses on the failure of the Dutch West India Company and the eventual takeover of the colony by the English in 1664 or emphasizes the importance of Dutch heritage for the modern economic and cultural development of the state of New York and the development of capitalistic trading forms, in particular trading companies.

Drawing upon the insights of the New York History roundtable, this chapter suggests another approach for discussing the relevance of the Dutch empire in early New York by connecting it to current debates about individual agency and entrepreneurship that conditioned the economic realities in the Dutch case as in other colonial settings. Instead of labeling the history of the Dutch colony as “successful” or “failed,” my chapter explores how different people, institutions, and nations dealt with the economic and political uncertainty of colonial ventures in the seventeenth century in their own ways. In particular, my chapter explores how promising and profitable undertakings developed out of the coping strategies of individual entrepreneurs, trading companies, and governments. It equally considers how uncertainty excited economic actors of the early modern period and worked as a motor for colonial “projecting.”

Recent studies have sharpened our understanding of “projects” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and underlined the difference between early modern projects on the one hand and our contemporary understanding of projects on the other. A project, in the early modern context, referred to a specific plan or sequence of implementation to a much lesser degree than project management suggests today.⁴ For early modern actors, projects provided means of coping with the uncertainties of new ventures. Studies of military, architectonic, economic, political, and medical sources on schemes, drafts, and designs use early modern projects and the practice of projecting as a conceptual approach that allows insights into the design of early modern enterprises.⁵ As this research shows, projecting was a popular way to deal with economic and political uncertainty. Creating and implementing projects was meant to turn an uncertain and risky future into a still uncertain but profitable future with promising possibilities. Those who promoted projects in the early modern period were thus providing a way to mediate between the risks of failure and the hopes of profit and abundance because they adapted and customized their projects according to the circumstances of their investors. Studying the practice of projecting enables us to explore how perceptions of the danger of failing turned into conceptions of the open-endedness of future possibilities in the seventeenth century. At the same time, we can understand how projects and the practice of projecting served as catalyst for colonial enterprises by convincing investors to advance money for the building of infrastructure, facilitation of trade, and employment of manpower. Instead of judging whether an early modern project was successful or not from the standpoint of its later results, the study of projects and the practice of projecting opens up possibilities to better understand the challenges involved in planning and running a colonial enterprise in the seventeenth century.⁶

The first section of this chapter provides an overview of early modern sources on projects as well as current research on projects and the practice of projecting. The second section identifies the characteristics of projects in the history of New Netherland and emphasizes the importance of beaver fur for the Dutch enterprise in North America. The third and fourth study in detail how different actors and institutions dealt with the uncertainties of the Dutch colonial venture. Drawing on different cases, I examine how the practice of projecting shaped the Dutch colony as a promising market for investors, settlers, merchants, and adventurers. I then follow what happened when the vision of a promised colonial land needed to be adjusted to fit the desires and expectations of those who moved there, or of those who sent their commodities, moneys, and ships. By analyzing efforts to find permanent settlers as well as the colony’s desire for consumer goods, this chapter shows how the practice of projecting shaped the Dutch colonial enterprise.

Projects and the Practice of Projecting

The history of projects and the practice of projecting has recently gained attention in both the social sciences and the humanities.⁷ The French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello describe conceiving and carrying out projects as a main characteristic of what they call “the new spirit of capitalism,” which they see emerging in the 1960s.⁸ By studying managerial literature, they analyze how economic actors sell visions of the future through promoting projects. The German sociologist Jens Beckert advances a similar point in his 2016 book Imagined Futures. He links capitalist dynamics with fictional expectations. Beckert argues that modern capitalist economies are based on the possibility of imagining upcoming futures.⁹ “Decisions on investments, innovations, credits, or consumption,” he states, “develop imaginaries on how the future will look and how the decisions they make will influence outcomes.”¹⁰ Beckert’s ideas build on the work of the influential German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and his concept of future presents (zukünftige Gegenwarten). In Observations on Modernity, Luhmann asks how we can describe, in the present, a future that is not yet visible.¹¹ To examine the entanglement of different temporalities poses further questions that are also relevant for the recent historical discussion concerning projects and the practice of projecting. How can we desire something in the future that is not yet tangible? In which forms does the future appear in the present? The future—as Luhmann points out—emerges as a probability. As today’s economists would describe it, the future is modeled in multiple scenarios that are assigned different probabilities of actually becoming true. Believing in “the future as a probability” allows societies to attest that they have done well even when things come out differently than expected. Luhmann distinguishes between two different future-oriented temporalities. One he terms “present future”—by which he means “the future [conceived] as a temporal horizon of the present…an horizon…that we can never touch”—and the other, “future presents,” by which he means forecasts envisioned as possibilities that can be actualized in the future.¹² Mediation between these two contrasting temporalities is in turn based on what Luhmann calls “technologies,” which produce “a future [that is] defuturized,” meaning a future that is “incorporate[d]…into the present present,” in order “to make [this present present] a possible past for future presents.”¹³ Luhmann argued that economic actors, and experts in particular, claim that (intertemporal) uncertainty is calculable and can be quantified. Whereas the German sociologist sees attempts to mediate between different temporalities as a product of modernity, research from the field of early modern history shows that the practice of projecting and the mediation between temporalities was already emerging in the pre-modern period. This chapter shows how “premodern” actors and societies mediated between their “present future” and “future presents” within the practice of projecting using the terms and concepts devised in “their own time.”

In the early modern period, the intermediaries between the different temporalities that Beckert would describe as the promoters of “imagined futures” were called projectors. Today’s understanding of early modern projectors is still characterized by profit-oriented figures who proposed their unrealistic, risky, but sometimes valuable ideas at the various European courts and parliaments of the eighteenth century. Contemporary satires and comedies as well as cameralistic essays depicted projectors as negative and selfish figures.¹⁴ Daniel Defoe, author of the influential publication An Essay Upon Projects (1697), recognized the discredit of “undertakings blown up by the air of great Words.”¹⁵ “Fraud and Tricks” seemed possible because the projectors were paid in advance. In Defoe’s experience, “all such People who may be suspected of Design, have assuredly this in their Proposal: Your Money to the Author must go before the Experiment.”¹⁶ Against this contemporary disrepute, Defoe campaigned for a rehabilitation of projects, projectors, and the practice of projecting, since every new invention needed prior investment. Therefore, the granting of patents, for example, could help to initiate what Defoe called “honest projects.”¹⁷ For Defoe, “honest projects” were those whose purpose was to “find out any thing which may be of publick Advantage.”¹⁸ For him, this could be “new Discoveries in Trade, in Arts and Mysteries, of Manufacturing Goods, or Improvement of Land [as well] as any Discoveries made in the Works of Nature by all the Academies and Royal Societies in the world.”¹⁹

Today, Defoe’s Essay Upon Projects serves historians of the early modern era as an important reference and starting point for investigating the history of projects, although his dating of the Age of Projecting could be debated.²⁰ About the “Year 1680,” he states, “began the Art and Mystery of Projecting to creep into the World.”²¹ However, as several recent studies have shown, the term “project” emerged in military, architectural, and socioeconomic contexts all over Europe already in the fourteenth century.²² By tracing back the terms “project” and “projector” in the English Short Title Catalogue, historian Koji Yamamoto has identified at least two “ages of projecting” in seventeenth-century England: one in the 1640s and one in the decades around 1700.²³ As we will see in more detai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Imagining New Markets: Perils and Desires
• PART II Navigating Markets: Strategies and Affects
• PART III Controlling Markets: The State and Its Discontents
• List of Contributors
• Index