The Interlopers

Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-4214-4592-2
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 368 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 233 mm, Gewicht: 712 g

A reframing of how scientific knowledge was produced in the early modern world.

Winner of the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize by the Renaissance Society of America, and the Leo Gershoy Prize by the American Historical Association, Shortlisted for the Jon Ben Snow Prize by the North American Conference of British Studies

Many accounts of the scientific revolution portray it as a time when scientists disciplined knowledge by first disciplining their own behavior. According to these views, scientists such as Francis Bacon produced certain knowledge by pacifying their emotions and concentrating on method. In The Interlopers, Vera Keller rejects this emphasis on discipline and instead argues that what distinguished early modernity was a navigation away from restraint and toward the violent blending of knowledge from across society and around the globe.

Keller follows early seventeenth-century English "projectors" as they traversed the world, pursuing outrageous entrepreneurial schemes along the way. These interlopers were developing a different culture of knowledge, one that aimed to take advantage of the disorder created by the rise of science and technological advances. They sought to deploy the first submarine in the Indian Ocean, raise silkworms in Virginia, and establish the English slave trade. These projectors developed a culture of extreme risk-taking, uniting global capitalism with martial values of violent conquest. They saw the world as a riskscape of empty spaces, disposable people, and unlimited resources.

By analyzing the disasters—as well as a few successes—of the interlopers she studies, Keller offers a new interpretation of the nature of early modern knowledge itself. While many influential accounts of the period characterize European modernity as a disciplining or civilizing process, The Interlopers argues that early modernity instead entailed a great undisciplining that entangled capitalism, colonialism, and science.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Keller, Vera

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Undisciplining of Knowledge
1. The Political Economy of Projects
2. Cast of Characters
3. "Projectors are commonly the best Naturalists": Knowledge Practices
4. Statecraft: "Swimming between two Waters" in Global Policy
5. Transplanters of Empire: Forcing Nature and Labor
6. Turning against the Liberal Arts
7. Unlimited Invention
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Keller, Vera
Vera Keller (EUGENE, OR) is a professor of history at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725.