The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge

The Interlopers by Vera Keller challenges the traditional view of the scientific revolution as a time of discipline and instead highlights the violent blending of knowledge from across society and around the globe. Keller follows early seventeenth-century English projectors as they pursue outrageous entrepreneurial schemes, developing a culture of extreme risk-taking that united global capitalism with martial values of violent conquest. She offers a new interpretation of the nature of early modern knowledge itself, arguing that it entailed a great undisciplining that entangled capitalism, colonialism, and science.

Format: Hardback
Length: 368 pages
Publication date: 18 April 2023
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

A reframing of how scientific knowledge was produced in the early modern world has been presented by Vera Keller, who won the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize by the Renaissance Society of America and the Leo Gershoy Prize by the American Historical Association and was shortlisted for the Pfizer Award by the History of Science Society. Keller challenges the traditional view of the scientific revolution as a time when scientists disciplined knowledge by first disciplining their own behavior, arguing 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 force, Keller argues that it was also a time of great disorder and violence, with interlopers seeking to exploit the chaos created by the rise of science and technology.

Weight: 732g
Dimension: 240 x 161 x 31 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781421445922