This was a radically new way of envisioning the Earth, as a “vast machine made of inert particles in ceaseless motion.”19 Even in Europe, the mechanistic vision of the world had only just begun to take shape, and then too, only among elites that were directly or indirectly involved in the two great European projects of the time: the conquest of the Americas and the trade in enslaved Africans. It was the rendering of humans into mute resources that enabled the metaphysical leap whereby the Earth and everything in it could also be reduced to inertness. In
