The first study to reveal the remarkable extent to which the culture of improvement in early modern England was not only preoccupied with promises of public service, but also pervaded by a strong public distrust of such promises~Places the evolution of ideas about 'projecting' or entrepreneurship within the context of state-formation, mercantilism, and the rise of the fiscal state and the financial revolution~Presents case studies of concrete projects drawing on sources conventionally used in political history, local history, parliamentary history, and the history of science~Develops a fresh, integrated, account of England's incipient capitalism that has civic, as well as scholarly, implications