Anthropologist Elisabeth Povinelli traces how conceptions of sentience persisting from Medieval Europe were suppressed during subsequent centuries. A "country that listens" had to be rejected as concerns about manufacturing and imperialism took hold. Industrialists (..) were not about to stand for objects that act wilfully, for how could manufacturing proceed under such circumstances? The new sciences came to see (..) wilfull objects as too troublesome, and they opted instead for mechanical models (..) [which] posited a "natural" mechanical order, liable to human manipulation.

//Cruikshank, J. 2005. Do glaciers listen: local knowledge, colonial encounters and social imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press., p.143