ABSTRACT
In one of Daniel Defoe’s earliest works, a lengthy tract written in 1697, just five years before he was to be sentenced to the pillory for his The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, he refers to the spirit and action of the time as “the Projecting Age.”1 Defoe makes clear that “projection” is central both to the “matters of negotiation” and the methods of “civil politics” which we see this age arrived to.”2 This concept conveys insights on an age replete with new exercises in “invention,” the term covering everything from instruments of the “art of war” to speculations on new “engines” that quickly disappear like “abortions of the brain.”3 The broader context for acts of “projection” in Defoe’s essay evokes an even more familiar paradigmone that would come to define a particular version of “modernism”—where the taxonomies created by the separate institutions and functional differentiation of government, commerce, and leisure become more transparent.4 We see the vast importance of such projects across Defoe’s corpus, and their relationship to technology as a primary fulcrum for both the polity and commerce of his moment. The lists and taxonomies that proliferate throughout Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the Plague Year in particular point to a newly-productive connection between information, mechanical operations and political and economic projects. Crusoe’s tables, “Machines,” and “Squaring” operations are the very basis by which he can consider himself the producer of a new island nation: he is “Master” foremost because he becomes a “Master of every Mechanical Art.”5
