Projects in the History of Knowledge
An Introduction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55283/jhk.21237Keywords:
projects, knowledge, power, situation, violence, risk, labor, informationAbstract
The Panama Canal, the silkworm, a sugar plantation, the South Sea Bubble, an industrial workschool: they may seem to have little in common, but these, and other disparate interventions from around the globe, share a common epistemology relating knowledge and power in a specific dynamic: the project. A category new to the early modern period that still structures the world around us, the project offers tools for the critical and historical analysis of the large-scale, entangled changes that made modernity. Projects were, to borrow a phrase from Foucault, “technologies of power” that brought together, in a short span of time, many of the social mores, spiritual ends, and epistemic values associated with the modern world. Yet, even as projects claimed to offer new mechanisms for eradicating waste, solving problems, and realizing untold profits by mobilizing peoples and materials, they also engineered large-scale displacement and devastation. The history of projects centers not only the dynamism and ambition but also the violence and ignorance built into economically rationalized visions of the future. For projects were not the laughable schemes many satires suggested; they were integral to global capitalism, epistemic and financial risk-taking, labor exploitation, and environmental degradation. This special issue shows what their impacts were, how projects were configured as forms of knowledge, and how they interrelated with a global landscape of risk and possibility. Addressing their legacies requires critically exploring projects as modes of intervention in the world.
Downloads
References
“Lage.” In Großes vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, edited by Johann Heinrich Zedler. Halle and Leipzig: Zedler, 1731–54.
Abeille, Jean-Paul. Lettre d’un négociant sur la nature du commerce des grains. S.n., 1763.
Abou-Nemeh, Catherine. “Daring to Conjecture in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Science.” Isis 113, no. 4 (2022): 728–46. https://doi.org/10.1086/721999.
Ahmed, Sara. What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Duke University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478007210.
Anonymous. Franckreich Wage nicht zu viel! Frankfurt: Weidmann, 1686.
Ash, Eric H. Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Ash, Eric H. The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1353/book.51998.
Becher, Johann Joachim. Politische Discurs. Frankfurt: Zunner, 1673.
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by Mark Ritter. Sage Publications, 1992.
Botero, Giovanni. “Del sito.” In Della ragion di stato. Venice: Appresso I Gioliti, 1589.
Botero, Giovanni. Relations of the most famous Kingdoms and Common-weales through the world, Discoursing of their situations, manners, customes, strengthes and pollicies: Translated into English and enlarged. London: Iohn Iaggard, 1611.
Brugger, Eva. “Dealing With Uncertainty. The Practice of Projecting and the Colony of New Netherland, 1609–1664.” In The Cultural Life of Risk and Innovation: Imagining New Markets from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, edited by Chia Yin Hsu, Thomas M. Luckett, and Erika Vause. Routledge, 2020.
Burke, Peter. “History of Knowledge.” In Debating Contemporary Approaches to the History of Science, edited by Lukas M. Verburgt. Bloomsbury, 2024.
Burke, Peter. “Foreword: The History of the Future, 1350–2000.” In The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe, edited by Andrea Brady and Emily Butterworth. Routledge, 2010.
Calè, Luisa, and Adriana Craciun. “The Disorder of Things.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 1 (2011): 1–13. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2011.0036.
De Wilde, Samuel. “The School of Projects.” The Satirist, Sept. 12, 1809.
Defoe, Daniel. An Essay Upon Projects. London, 1697.
Dimbath, Oliver. Oblivionism: Forgetting and Forgetfulness in Modern Science. Brill, 2021. https://doi.org/10.30965/9783846765739.
Dotson, Kristie. “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.” Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 236–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01177.x.
Van Duffel, Siegfried and Dennis Yap. “Distributive Justice Before the Eighteenth Century: The Right of Necessity.” History of Political Thought 32, no. 3 (2011): 449–64.
Fedyukin, Igor. The Enterprisers. The Politics of School in Early Modern Russia. Oxford University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190845001.001.0001.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon. Pantheon Press, 1972.
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory and Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Edited by Michel Senellart and translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Knopf Doubleday, 1982.
Friedrich, Susanne. “Caveat from the Archive: Pieter van Dam’s Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie and Crisis Management,” Journal for the History of Knowledge 1 (2020): 1–14.
https://doi.org/10.5334/jhk.15.
Gierl, Martin. “Science, Projects, Computers and the State: Swift’s Lagadian and Leibniz’s Prussian Academy.” In The Age of Projects, edited by Maximilian E. Novak. University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Guicciardini, Ludovico. Descrittione. . . di tutti i Paesi Bassi. Antwerp: Willem Silvius, 1567.
Head, Randolph C., “Records, Secretaries, and the European Information State, circa 1400–1700.” In Information: A Historical Companion, edited by Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing and Anthony Grafton. Princeton University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691209746-010.
Hein, Carola. “The What, Why, and How of Planning History.” In The Routledge Handbook of Planning History, edited by Carola Hein. Routledge, 2017. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315718996.
Hogarth, Rana A. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Hui, Alexandra, Lissa Roberts, and Seth Rockman, “Introduction: Launching a Labor History of Science.” Isis 114, no. 4 (2023): 816–26. https://doi.org/10.1086/727646.
Jardine, Boris. “Instruments of Statecraft: Humphrey Cole, Elizabethan Economic Policy and the Rise of Practical Mathematics.” Annals of Science 75, no. 4 (2018): 304–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2018.1528510.
Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds. Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Keller, Vera. Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Keller, Vera. “‘A Political Fiat Lux’: Wilhem von Schroeder (1640–1688) and the Co-Production of Chymical and Political Oeconomy.” In “Eigennutz” und “gute Ordnung”: Ökonomisierungen der Welt im 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Sandra Richter and Guillaume Garner. Harrassowitz, 2016.
Keller, Vera. “Into the Unknown: Clues, Hints and Projects in the History of Knowledge.” History and Theory 59, no. 4 (2020): 86–110. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12183.
Keller, Vera, and Ted McCormick. “Towards a History of Projects.” Early Science and Medicine 21, no. 5 (2016): 423–44. https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-00215p01.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. MIT Press, 1985.
Krajewski, Markus. World Projects: Global Information Before World War I. Translated by Charles Marcrum II. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
McCormick, Ted. Human Empire: Mobility and Demographic Thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Mohun, Arwen P. “Constructing the History of Risk. Foundations, Tools, and Reasons Why.” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 41, no. 1 (2016): 30–47. https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.41.2016.1.30-47.
Mokyr, Joel. Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton University Press, 2002.
Morgan, Jennifer L. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Duke University Press, 2021.
Mukerji, Chandra. Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi. Princeton University Press, 2009.
Nacol, Emily C. An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain. Princeton University Press, 2016.
Newman, Simon P. A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Nipperdey, Justus. “‘Intelligenz’ und ‘Staatsbrille.’ Das Ideal der vollkommenen Information in ökonomischen Traktaten des 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhunderts.” In Information in der Frühen Neuzeit. Status, Bestände, Strategien, edited by Arndt Brendecke, Markus Friedrich, and Susanne Friedrich. LIT, 2008.
Novak, Maximilian E., ed. The Age of Projects. University of Toronto Press, 2008. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442687349.
Oldmixon, John. The British Empire in America. Vol. 2. London: John Nicholson, 1708.
Pendleton-Jullian, Ann, and John Seely Brown. “In Search of Ontologies of Entanglement.” Daedalus 152, no. 1 (2023): 265–71. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01987.
Proctor, Robert N., and Londa Schiebinger. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford University Press, 2008.
Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University Press, 2017.
Rassem, Mohammed. “Stichproben aus dem Wortfeld der alten Statistik,” In Statistik und Staatsbeschreibung in der Neuzeit, edited by Mohammed Rassem and Justin Stagl. Schöningh, 1980.
Reeves, Eileen. Evening News: Optics, Astronomy, and Journalism in Early Modern Europe. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Renn, Jürgen. The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Princeton University Press, 2020.
Robson, Elly. “Improvement and Epistemologies of Landscape in Seventeenth-Century English Forest Enclosure.” The Historical Journal 60, no. 3 (2017): 597–632. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X16000261.
Sandl, Marcus. “Development as Possibility: Risk and Chance in the Cameralist Discourse.” In Economic Growth and the Origins of Modern Political Economy: Economic Reasons of State, 1500–2000, edited by Philipp R. Rössner. Routledge, 2016.
Schröder, Wilhelm, von. Fürstliche Schatz- und Rent-Cammer. Leipzig: Gerdesius, 1686.
Slack, Paul. The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Harvard University Press, 2008.
Soll, Jacob. The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System. University of Michigan Press, 2009. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.243021.
Stewart, Larry, and Kelly Whitmer. “Expectations and Utility in Eighteenth-Century Knowledge Economies.” Notes and Records 72, no. 2 (2018): 111–17. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2018.0004.
Sussmann, Charlotte. “The Colonial Afterlife of Political Arithmetic: Swift, Demography, and Mobile Populations.” Cultural Critique 56 (2004): 96–126. https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2003.0065.
Swift, Jonathan. A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people from being a burthen to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public. Dublin: S. Harding, 1729.
Swift, Jonathan. Serious and Useful Scheme to make a Hospital for Incurables. London: J. Roberts, 1733.
Thirsk, Joan. Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press, 1978. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700104759.
Thomas, Dalby. An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Colonies, and of the Great Advantages they are to England, in respect to Trade. London: Jo. Hindmarsh, 1690.
Verburgt, Lukas. “History of Scientific Ignorance.” In Debating Contemporary Approaches, edited by Verburgt.
Warde, Paul. The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, 1500–1870. Cambridge University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316584767.
Whitmer, Kelly. “Imagining Uses for Things: Teaching ‘Useful Knowledge’ in the Early Eighteenth Century.” History of Science 55, no.1 (2017): 37–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275316678872.
Whitmer, Kelly. “Projects and Pedagogical Expectations: Inside P. J. Marperger’s ‘Golden Clover Leaf.’” Notes and Records 72, no. 2 (2018): 139–57. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2018.0005.
Whitt, Laurelyn. Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge. Cambridge University Press, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511760068.
Wilkins, John. An Essay towards a real character and a philosophical language. London: Gellibrand, 1668.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos.” Annals of Scholarship 8, no. 2 (1991): 251–86.
Yamamoto, Koji. Taming Capitalism Before its Triumph: Public Service, Distrust, and ‘Projecting’ in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Zincke, D. Georg Heinrich. “Vorrede, worinnen von Projecten und Projecten-Machern gehandelt wird.” In Peter Krezschmer, Oeconomische Vorschläge, Wie das Holtz zu vermehren, Die Strassen mit schönen Alleen zu besetzen ... sind: Nebst einem Anhange ohnmaßgeblicher Vorschläge, wie grosser Herren Küchen und Tafeln verbessert. Halle and Leipzig, 1744.
Zwierlein, Cornel. “Introduction: Towards a History of Ignorance.” In The Dark Side of Knowledge: Histories of Ignorance, 1400 to 1800, edited by Cornel Zwierlein. Brill, 2016.
Zwinger, Theodor. Methodus apodemica in eorum gratiam, qui cum fructu in quocunq[ue] tandem vitae genere peregrinari cupiunt. Basel: Episcopius, 1577.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Vera Keller, Ted McCormick, Kelly J. Whitmer
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
