“Projects,” Monopolies, and “Nabobing”

This chapter first delineates the senses of “project” and “projectors” as understood in the pamphlets and books in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The negative connotations of the terms were in part offset in the latter century by more positive views of “projects,” but the suspicion of “projects” as a word referring to insidious schemes for profiteering that merely pretended to benefit the public lasted fairly long, in part because it could easily form alliance with criticism of monopoly and monopolists. For many authors, closely related to moral and economic conspiracies denoted by the word “project” were the monopolies, which, though sanctioned by laws and statutes, inherently perverted the natural law of free trade and, in the case of the “Nabobs,” even the natural law of universal morality. The last section of the chapter covers Edmund Burke’s impeachment of Warren Hastings, the chief of the “Nabobs,” which, albeit a political trial, made a forceful connection between the defendant’s moral and economic corruptions.