Expectations and utility in eighteenth-century knowledge economiesNotes and Records special issue introduction

Creating a sketch, a plan or a model for the future is often closely related to endeavouring to predict what it may yield. It is also a process that stabilizes contemporary portrayals of social realities, including those aspects understood as problems, or in need of improvement. As Sang-Hyun Kim and Sheila Jasanoff have shown in their work on ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’, frequently plans and ‘visions of scientific and technological progress’ act as vehicles for communicating ideas, implicitly and explicitly, about ‘public purposes, collective futures and the common good’ in a particular historical moment.1 Plans and sketchy visions for the future are worthy of study in their own right, even if they are never realized, because of the efforts to organize expectations and to assimilate ideas about what is (and is not) in the ‘public interest’ that they purport to represent.2 Attending to the origins and expectations inducing projects of envisioning the future, that is, attending to ‘dreamscapes’ that may or may not have been realized in the long eighteenth century, is a major task of this special issue. All of the essays take as their starting point that the imagined futures of this period reveal a distinct constellation of agendas, moral imperatives and politics. Indeed, the eighteenth century was full of dreamscapes. Their makers routinely devised particular categories and practices to both articulate and, in some cases, to actually build the imagined futures they desired—or claimed to desire. In this period's ‘knowledge economy’, a term now generally associated with the work of economic historian Joel Mokyr, makers of dreamscapes and professional analysts of the future were often called ‘projectors’ or ‘project makers’.3 This particular cadre of ‘dreamscapers’ tended to anchor their visions in sketches, schemes or plans for improvement(s). Mokyr focused on the British context during the dramatic …