Joan Thirsk's Economic Policy and Projects has enabled scholars to understand the dramatic development of the English economy in the second half of the sixteenth century. Thirsk detects a shift in the economic mentality of this period: a movement away from the social conscience of the commonwealth thinkers, who were preoccupied with the covetousness of the nobility, to a much more positive recognition of self-interest. This transition, she argues, is embodied in Thomas Smith's A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England. Smith's dialogue was written in 1549, at the height of the ideological contention and tumult provoked by the supposed twin evils of the period's economic change, inflation and enclosure, and printed posthumously in 1581. The subtitle of Thirsk's book, The Development of a Consumer Culture in Early Modern England, implies that this transition represents the ‘modernising’ of the English economy. That is, in this period we begin to see take shape a conception of the market and enterprise that might be considered ‘capitalist’. Two key words were to characterise the later decades, Thirsk suggests, ‘project’ and ‘projector’. ‘Everyone with a scheme, whether to make money, to employ the poor, or to explore the far corners of the earth had a “project”’, that is, ‘a practical scheme for exploiting material things’. Smith was himself an enthusiastic, if misguided, projector. Of the several projects in which he invested two in particular – both in the year 1571 – stand out, conspicuous mostly for their ill-foundation and failure.