(2015), The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge (2023), and Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century (forthcoming), and over forty articles and book chapters on the development of the idea and practices of research in early modern Europe.
Keller applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Interlopers and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about The Interlopers at the Johns Hopkins University Press....expectation that his new design for alum boiling vessels would pan out and provide an injection of much-needed funds. Lowe described the workers as “a multitude of poor miserable people that are ready to starve for want of means to buy bread and will not be quieted with any answer but money.” He heard that Russell was barely keeping “them from violence, which cannot long be suppressed.”Like tech bros today, projectors moved fast and broke things. They introduced disruptive innovations in ways connected to a socially elite sense of self. Projectors pursued purposefully grand projects because their ambition itself defended their honor as members of a formerly military class now wading into enterprise. This linkage of ambition and commerce is central to my larger argument about science and capitalism. Many historians have related science to commerce, often through metaphorical "trading zones" supporting a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge between craftsmen and philosophers. These zones assume that science was built from collaboration, trust, and restraint. In Interlopers, I offer a rival model for how science developed: gleeful interloping into the domains of others, producing wild, often violent mashups of knowledge. Their lack of care for the consequences spoke to their elevated sprezzatura (lack of care) distinguishing them from the hoi polloi.
Meanwhile, Russell also wrote to Ingram in his own defense, saying that he was “forced to devise new courses” for making alum since Lowe had “failed me in delivering ashes, liquor and urine.”\ Russell claimed that he had told Lowe concerning his new design that “if he or any one disliked it when they had seen it I would disclaim all hope and interest in the works,” but that Lowe didn’t have the “patience or grace” to give Russell’s new method a chance. Lowe, Russell claimed, “pays the men with big, roaring words and no money and sets them all against me.”
In another lengthy letter in his defense to Ingram, Russell displayed some of his rhetorical skills that allowed him to stand fast against accusations of incompetence and impropriety. Russell accused Lowe of acting “like a bear robbed of her whelps . . . professing against all my courses, chafing, railing, swearing, cursing, exclaiming and what not, by which means he hath brought such an uproar in the country that it will not easily be appeased.” Russell claimed that Lowe had not been pulling his weight in the alum business. Lowe and others were supposed to act “as stewards and caters of the work, as I was to be the cook.” Alum production was “not one man’s work,” and Russell would like to see Lowe try to “hold the plough himself, as I have done all this while.” In the end, Lowe’s “great roaring against me will be but like a raging billow against a rock, dissolving in his own froth.”
Many sided with Russell against Lowe and Ingram. Lord Sheffield (who along with Bourchier had previously collaborated with Russell on a privilege for copper production in 1614) wrote to Ingram in 1619, warning “if it appear that the malice of those who oppose Mr. Russell cause these contradictions to shuffle him out of the works I hold myself tied in honour to see him righted.” Brooke and Bourchier also stuck with Russell. In 1624 Sir John Bourchier proposed restarting the alum works and pairing it with a soap works, promising that the king would enjoy a profit of 20,000 pounds a year from it; Russell would long figure in this project for soap. Brooke also partnered with Russell again for soap in 1624 and on another large-scale project for the production of saltpeter in 1626/27.
On page 99 we witness a dramatic breakdown towards the end of a failed project. Gentlemen projectors won a patent for alum, an important chemical in dyeing whose production included noxious fumes and run-off. It went poorly. One of the projectors, George Lowe, contracted Thomas Russell, a well-known projector, to turn things around. Russell made it much worse. He melted down the alum works' vessels to make new ones of his own design. Confident in his innovation, Russell awaited the infusion of capital that would allow him to pay his workmen. Instead, he had to throw out his new pans and remake the old ones at an estimated cost of 7,500 pounds. What came next was a blame game between Russell and the projector who had hired him, each outdoing the next in wonderful 17th-century insults.
Recent scholars have understood Russell as a craftsman who collaborated with a philosopher (Francis Bacon) in a "trading zone." I argue that he was a gentleman, not a craftsperson. He possessed little expertise across the many industries into which he interloped. His skills lay rather in sketching grand plans that appealed to the elite. On page 99, we not only get fine examples of his rhetoric, but also a mention of the "honor" that motivated the continued support for him. Despite Russell's recent failure with alum, Russell moved seamlessly on, with royal patronage, to two of the most infamous, intrusive, and large-scale projects of the era (soap and saltpeter), leaving behind starving workmen, broken relationships, and a polluted landscape.
--Marshal Zeringue
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