A Further Account of the Province of Pennsylvania and Its Improvements is a short printed tract by William Penn, running to twenty pages, written in his own voice and signed with his name. Its full title states its purpose plainly: it is offered “for the satisfaction of those that are adventurers, and enclined to be so” — that is, for people who had already bought into the colony and for those considering it. It is not a travel narrative, a natural history, or a general description of America, but a practical, promotional report on the condition and progress of Pennsylvania at a particular juncture, addressed to prospective purchasers, renters and settlers. The piece carries a caption title rather than a formal title page, is subscribed from Worminghurst-place and dated in the Tenth Month (December by the old reckoning) of 1685, and ends with a short page of errata.
The tract opens by explaining why Penn had waited before publishing anything further. He acknowledges that a new account of the parts of America “where I am chiefly interested” had been much expected of him, since he had lived in the province for more than a year after his earlier published relation of it and had since his return received fresh and full reports of its progress. He states that the reason for his coming back to England was the difference between himself and Lord Baltimore over the lands of Delaware, a dispute he regarded as of great consequence to the colony. While that claim hung over Pennsylvania, he says, he deliberately held back from publishing anything that might look like special pleading for the country or an invitation to settle in it, since it lay under the discouragement and disrepute of Baltimore’s pretensions. Only after the matter had been argued through several full hearings before the Lords of the Committee for Plantations, and Baltimore’s claims had been dismissed, did he consider it fitting to publish. This framing occupies the opening of the pamphlet and sets the tone for the rest: the tract is written as a reply to doubts and objections, and as a reassurance that the colony’s legal foundations were now secure.
The body of the work is given over to the “improvements” of the title — the tangible progress of the settlement since Penn’s previous account of it. It is made up largely of concrete, practical and often quantitative information rather than of description for its own sake: the state of land clearing and cultivation, the growth of plantations, orchards and buildings, the increase of population, the produce of the soil and the raising of livestock, the conditions of trade and shipping, the prices of commodities and of land, rents and the terms on which lands were granted, the costs and arrangements of passage for settlers and servants, the provision of necessaries on arrival, and the workings of government and justice in the province, including its courts and assembly. Because Penn was writing for people weighing a commercial decision, the pamphlet is expressly concerned with what a newcomer would find and what his money would buy — the practical questions of acreage, tenure, rent and return — and it was valued by later writers precisely for containing statistical matter about the young colony that is absent from his earlier publications.
Alongside this commercial information the tract presents the colony as a well-ordered society as well as a profitable one: it speaks of the regular holding of meetings for worship, of the good order of the settlements, and of the peaceful and equitable dealing between the settlers and the native inhabitants that Penn regarded as one of the distinguishing features of his government. The tone throughout is that of an proprietor answering critics and encouraging the hesitant, balancing honest admission of the difficulties and disappointments the colony had faced against an insistence that its foundations were now firm and its improvement steady.
The result is a compact piece of colonial propaganda in the neutral, contemporary sense of the term: a proprietor’s progress report and sales prospectus combined, written in the first person and confined entirely to Pennsylvania and its affairs as they stood at the moment of writing. It belongs with Penn’s other promotional writings on the province and is chiefly valuable as a witness to the state of the colony, and to the arguments by which its founder sought to sustain confidence in it, at the point when the Baltimore dispute had been settled in his favour.
Because it is a sequel, the tract’s authority depends on continuity: it recalls earlier promises only to show them being fulfilled, and it treats the present state of the colony as evidence that the original design was sound. The reader is not asked to admire Pennsylvania in the abstract but to measure it—by cleared acres, rents, provisions, courts, and the ordinary routines of settlement—and to conclude that the risk of removal has been reduced. The proprietary voice is therefore both testimonial and hortatory: it reports conditions and, in reporting them, urges confidence.
The work’s broader idea of “improvement” joins material cultivation to civil order. Land brought into use, trade carried on, and buildings raised are presented as parts of the same enterprise as regular worship, legal proceedings, and equitable relations with the native inhabitants. In that sense the pamphlet defends not merely a location but a model of settlement: a colony of secure tenures, orderly government, and productive estates, where the proprietor’s interest and the settler’s welfare are meant to coincide. Its significance for the modern reader lies in this fusion of sales prospectus, administrative report, and apology—a compact statement of what Penn wanted Pennsylvania to be and of the evidence he thought would persuade others to see it so.
