Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), p. 123

A recent review of this book, by Piet van Cruyningen in the Dutch Journal of Water History (Tijdschrift voor Waterstaatsgeschiedenis), vol. 27, no. 2, concluded that Ash had written a brilliant book that would set the standard for decades to come. High praise indeed, and totally deserved, if you ask me. In eight chapters, chronologically ordered between an Introduction and Epilogue, Ash provides us with a detailed, entertaining and convincing account of how drainage activities in the Fens area, specifically the Hatfield Level and the Great Level Drainage, relate to – and need to be understood as – state building activities. His balanced attention and (sometimes implicit) judgement on actions and opinions of Fenlanders and outsiders – ranging from kings to prospectors – allows the reader to understand the drainage projects in the Fens as a continuously negotiated process.

The different Commissions of Sewers in the Fens were important actors in the negotiations, assuming we can define them as single actors, given their internal struggles. The role of the Commissions remains somewhat unclear to me, though. In the first part of the book (the first four chapters), Ash stresses that it was the local knowledge embodied in the Commissions that made more centralized control so difficult to achieve. We learn how important the role of the Commissions was in controlling the land and who could access it, both materially and on maps. For a long time, this control was preventing the Fens from being drained. However, we also read that drainage of the Hatfield Fens had no need to work through Commissions of Sewers, as there was only one landowner, the crown itself (p. 148). Despite not having the need to work through Commissions, Hatfield’s drainage started rather late too, in the 1620s. Would it be correct to argue that whether Fen areas had influential Commissions or not, there was no drainage under King James I? If so, what does that tell us about state formation and its success?

In the process of Fen drainage, we encounter what I would like to call the ontology of failure and success: success and failure are constructed. We encounter several suggestions in the book that support this idea. Ash writes that ‘the fate of the land itself was shaped by the power to define it’ (p. 194). This was not only the case for the Fens in their pre-drainage state. At a certain moment, ‘the Great level was both drained and not drained’ (p. 203), as there were different statements on the effects and status of the works. It is a little strange then to find statements suggesting that, to take one example, the ‘project of Ayloffe and Thomas thus represents a failed attempt at state building in Jacobean England’ (p. 138). Fate of failure was also shaped by the power to define it, I would think. Can we define with certainty what the Jacobean state would have to look like anyway? Perhaps the results of the project were not as hoped for by some, but the interactions between representatives of the central state-in-the-making and Fens-in-transition must have changed something in the relations between them – and thus state building itself as well.

Another key issue is the idea of the state itself. Obviously state policies change over time, and the book does indeed show this. We read about the ‘crown’s new, more aggressive policy’ (p. 64) towards draining the Fens. In that light, I find the observation that the Great Level ‘company … continued to be supported by the full legal and administrative apparatus of the early modern English state, both before and after the collapse of the protectorate and the Restoration of King Charles II’ (pp. 296–7) – rather interesting, and a little problematic. I would suggest it is unlikely that there is something like a defined, stable early modern state over the period of these dramatic events. The ‘state’ is an entity that needs to recreate its own support continuously. I find this idea of a continuous early modern state – which is presented at the end of the final chapter before the Epilogue, so rather late in the book – at odds with the careful and detailed analysis of Fen drainage as an example of the ambivalence of state formation in the book as a whole.

State formation is clearly a process that is always local, both in the Fens and in London – and elsewhere – which makes the concept of the state itself ambivalent. Ash may reserve the word ‘local’ to those from the Fens, but he makes it perfectly clear that even if they are only local, their actions make or break what wanted to become the centralized state. Indeed, like state building, ‘[a]ll politics is local, ultimately’ (p. 238). Ash manages to bring all these locals into his narrative in a clear and convincing manner. A suggestion from my side would be to consider the crown as local too. Crown policy in London is as locally constructed as Fen drainage by state and non-state agents that negotiate its realization in the Fens and London. Ash shows beautifully how (Dutch and English) prospectors acted as representatives of themselves, other agents in society, a glorious future – defined by themselves – and the crown that wanted to build a more centralized state – all at once.

In the Epilogue, Ash concludes that ‘[d]rainage projects were […] a manifestation of the early modern centralization of governance under a unitary English monarchy – an exercise in state building.’ (p. 309). Where chapter 8 had suggested a final success in Fen drainage and state building, it becomes clear rather quickly in the Epilogue that the exercise never ends – or so it could have been. The land itself continued in its refusal to cooperate, with the result that the ‘Bedford Level Corporation was clearly losing control of the Great Level as time went on’ (p. 307). One page later we even read that the ‘creation of a single, coordinated drainage network in the Great Level had largely failed’ (p. 308). However, Ash does not relate these continuous efforts to keep the Fens controlled to the process of state formation itself. If draining land was so closely related to state building, one would expect that keeping land dry was as well.

Obviously, I do not ask Ash to write an even longer book that encompasses the even longer history of the draining of the Fens. I would just have liked to see a simple statement like ‘state building never ends’. Instead, Ash goes even further on the route of state centralization by claiming that ‘Fen drainage […] went beyond state building to become a quasi-imperial project’ (p. 310). Why is this step needed? I would argue that the processes that Ash describes are indeed also happening in settings that are (now) defined as colonial or imperial – including the rather utopian way of thinking of many representatives of the state. I simply think that we should not allow a difference in terminology between state building and empire building as a process. Empires are not necessarily more or less top-down or centralized than national states – but they are as local as centralized states.

In the last pages of his great book, Ash refers to recent ideas to allow the Fens a little more wetness, by enlarging remaining wetlands and changing water management arrangements. I cannot wait for someone – and why not Eric Ash himself? – to write about this process in the same excellent way that Ash has done for sixteenth and seventeenth-century drainage projects in the Fens. After all, twenty-first-century rewilding initiatives must be regarded as efforts of state building too.