This is a paperback edition of a title first published in 2010 but not reviewed in The Scriblerian.“World Makers” was the hostile appellation used by mathematician John Keill to designate those “theorists” who purported to explain the physics of biblical history, who, in Keill’s words, claimed to identify “the true cause of every effect, from the sole principles of matter and motion,” not least “how God made the World.” In the second half of the seventeenth century, natural philosophers across Europe raised ever thornier questions about planetary history, how observed geomorphology and principles of mechanical causation could be synthesized with the Mosaic account of the Creation and Deluge. Poole seeks to correct the interpretation of the scientific revolution as a matter of “the triumph of the exact sciences... mathematics and astronomy.” Universal gravitation, despite Newton’s own eclectic investigations and at times heterodox speculations, served temporarily to suture science and religion. Newton was able mathematically to verify a principle of order that remained deeply enigmatic; as to “whether this agent be material or immaterial,” Newton professed no opinion. In the decades before and after the publication of the Principia Mathematica (1687), savants were considering not only the hidden structure of the cosmos but also the dynamic processes of change evinced in the Earth’s strata, in fossils and ruins, and in the history of nations and languages. Inquiry into the actual history of our dynamic world proved far more discomfiting to orthodoxy than the laws of planetary motion.Such speculation has a long history. Nicholas of Lyra, writing in the early fourteenth century, examined the Aristotelian physics implied in Mosaic cosmogenesis. In the early sixteenth century, Paracelsus proposed an alchemical model of the processes of separation recounted in Genesis. Poole highlights the controversial influence of two classical sources, Aristotle and Lucretius. Despite its atheistic implications, Aristotle’s account of geological “vicissitude,” gradual but constant geomorphological change, inspired the pioneering geologists Nicolaus Steno and Robert Hooke. The first world maker, according to Keill, was the Greek philosopher Epicurus. In 1662, Edward Stillingfleet claimed that Epicurean physics “makes [the] most noise in the world.” Pierre Gassendi offered the compromise that made atomism safe for pious natural philosophers, granting responsibility for the original arrangement of atoms to the deity. Gassendi’s Christianized corpuscularism influenced Boyle and Newton, among others. Yet, as Poole notes, atomism remained “theologically sensitive,” not least because of its association with Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, which “explicitly rejected providence.” No thinker in the period could consider processes of change in the Earth, in biological organisms, or in human societies without awareness—however sublimated—of the Lucretian account of a world in which growth and decline occur without supernatural direction.Keill’s attack was focused on two notorious texts of world making ambition: Descartes’s Principia Philosophiæ (1644) and Thomas Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra (1681–1689). The real engine of the story Poole tells has to do with the contagiousness of historicist thinking, the way critics of the world makers ended up recapitulating their presuppositions and methods, arguing for different causal sequences—the momentary suspension of gravity! comets!—rather than the unquestioned authority of the Genesis narrative. To argue, as Keill did, that Burnet failed to account for the volume of water in the global deluge, thus necessitating a miraculous intervention, was simply to invite others to propose different mechanisms. Poole describes the “seductive possibility” of Isaac La Peyrère’s pre-Adamite hypothesis. It promised compromise: Aristotlian vicissitude or the long chronologies of non-European nations but also an unmodified “biblical chronology” following these “uncertain ages.” La Peyrère concerns were theological, but his proposal gave scriptural license for the imaginative reconstruction of histories not covered in Genesis. Edmund Halley claimed that extrapolation based on the salinity of the oceans could be used to determine the Earth’s age, which served orthodoxy by confuting the hypothesis of the planet’s eternity, but which might, as Halley wrote, reveal the world to be “much older than... hitherto imagined.”Poole is not sure what to do with Burnet. He refers to Keill’s Examination of Dr. Burnet’s Theory of the Earth (1698) as a “devastating” attack—a “demolition”—but dedicates little attention to the specifics of Keill’s argument. Burnet’s Sacred Theory was republished six times between 1701 and 1759, while Keill’s polemic was republished once. Poole calls Burnet’s focus on the Flood, rather than the Creation, his “major mistake.” Burnet’s solution—that the Mosaic account of the creation was simply an allegorical fable, as he asserted in Archæologiæ Philosophicæ (1692)—does contradict his literalist reading of the Deluge, but Burnet’s influence had less to do with the accuracy of his computation or the consistency of his argument than with the style of his thought, his baroque evocation of the Earth as a ruined planet the “broken form” of which attested to a history of cataclysm. Burnet’s influence, felt into the nineteenth century, reflected the imaginative verve with which he conveyed the romance of geological processes as well as the intellectual significance—as Stephen Jay Gould, Paolo Rossi, and Dmitri Levitin have each argued—of his attempt to describe planetary history as a sequential narrative.The intellectual world of the late seventeenth century was supported by new networks of cross-European exchange and debate. In recounting the story of this period, Poole himself barely engages the rich body of scholarship on the Royal Society, the history of the Earth sciences, secularization, and the radical Enlightenment. He justifies this “minimalist” approach to scholarly dialogue and citation by characterizing The World Makers as a “semi-general work.” To my mind, however, the salutary ambition to seek a broad audience does not warrant Poole’s steadfast refusal to practice the historicizing mode of thought the coming of age of which his book traces. Burnet, Hooke, Halley, and others sought to wrest from strata and fossils, artifacts and myths an understanding of the forces at work in history, in the history of the Earth and its nations. The World Makers tells its readers what happened, but does not propose any sustained hypotheses about why; it is as if the final cause, “the achievement of modern science,” displaces the imperative to explore the efficient cause. While it amounts to more than a “motley list of anecdotes,” Poole’s monograph grants little consideration to the conditions of possibility for the emergence of geohistorical thought, whether they be print culture, global exploration and empire-building, the rise of capitalism and technological innovation, or sectarian strife and the search for alternative foundations of authority.The majority of the savants discussed in The World Makers “thought that their research at worst would not interfere with, and at best bolster, Christian piety.” There is certainly an innocence in this period, in the belief that historical reconstruction and an examination of material causes could verify sacred history. The most fascinating moments in the book are those that attend to the anxiety and the pleasure experienced by these daring thinkers as they grappled with the implications of their research, their hypotheses, and their experiments. The stakes remained high. Thomas Burnet and Edmund Halley were both passed over for professional advancement due to their heterodox investigations. La Peyrère was imprisoned and forced to recant. Thomas Aikenhead, a twenty-year-old student in Edinburgh, was hanged in 1697 for blasphemy, having asserted in conversation that the Bible consisted of “poetical fictions.”Over the past half century, Earth System science has developed a revolutionary new account of the workings of our planet, of the reciprocal loops of molecular and thermodynamic interchange in the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. The Earth tends toward relative equilibrium but is also capable of sudden phase-transition, such as the current cataclysmic shift produced by the collective activity of single species. The World Makers tells the story of the beginning of the Earth sciences, a story that has lost none of its relevance for us in the twenty-first century still trying to find the terms with which to narrate the history of this dangerous and dynamic planet that is our home.