The Improvement Police
Nehemiah Grew on Knowledge, Nature, and Power
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55283/jhk.19141Keywords:
improvement, projecting, mercantilism, Royal Society, Nehemiah GrewAbstract
Studies of England’s path to industrialization often stress the significance of natural resources, knowledge, or power, but an early-eighteenth-century manuscript’s proposal for national wealth stressed instead the relationship, not the choice, between these factors. Its author, Nehemiah Grew, a former secretary of the Royal Society and prominent authority on plants, argued in 1706 that the state should authorize, disseminate, teach, and mandate the application of natural knowledge to farming, mining, trade, and manufacture. State officers would collect and explain scientific research—knowledge that would support supervision over and interventions into land management, work, consumption, and family life. While Baconian “improvement” in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is often seen as amateur and voluntary, Grew envisioned a state actively instructing its people in mandatory best practices and disciplining their behaviors. Properly armed with state power, science would make England’s people happy, its monarch invincible, and “there will be inventions new and infinite to the end of the world.” The beneficiaries of such policy were presented as a “public” that was distinct from England’s people, comprised instead of quantifiable and taxable wealth. Grew’s rhetoric worked to obscure his relationship to early modern projects, presenting instead the disinterested expertise characteristic of later Enlightenment political economy.
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