Engines of Division: Land, Labor, and Perpetual Motion in the Mid-Seventeenth Century English Atlantic

In this event, Ted McCormick (Concordia University) examines the inventor and agricultural improver Cressy Dymock’s (fl. 1649-60) project for a perpetual motion engine. A typical project of the circle around the “intelligencer” Samuel Hartlib (c.1600-1662), Dymock’s perpetual motion promised radical improvements in agricultural productivity and, by implication, solutions to problems of food supply and employment, together with a host of other advantages in engineering and manufactures. At the same time, Dymock proposed the engine for use in English colonies across the Atlantic, including Virginia and Barbados, where its implications for land and labour centered instead on rapid and profitable plantation and the production of export staples through increased reliance on enslaved labor. The paper explores what the migration of perpetual motion from one site and use to another can tell us about the role of projecting in constructing distinctions between metropolitan and colonial land and labor at a key moment of imperial expansion.

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