The usufructuary ethos

H-Environment recently posted a review by Jay David Miller of Erin Drew's The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century (U. Virginia Press, 2021). Some excerpts from the review:

Erin Drew summarizes the core principle of the early modern set of ideas she calls “the usufructory ethos” as follows: “What you have is ‘yours’ only in a partial and temporary sense” (p. 47). Nowhere did this principle manifest itself more clearly than in the figure of the landlord, who commanded power over tenants and by extension the land itself, but who was also, theoretically, bound by responsibilities to both subordinates and superiors. The concept of “usufruct”—which originated in Roman law but was heavily mediated through Christian theology—addressed the paradoxical nature of the landlord’s power by stipulating that the rights associated with ownership were circumscribed by far-reaching and interconnected obligations “that linked not only past, present, and future but [also] humans, nonhumans, and God, as well as the social, political, and natural worlds” (p. 2). Drew argues that recovering the history of the usufructory ethos in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain changes the way we understand the human relationship to the environment in this era and could inform how we imagine it today.

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After tracing various iterations of the usufructory ethos through the writings of John Howe, Richard Allestree, Thomas Adams, Matthew Hale, and Thomas Tryon, Drew concludes chapter 1 with the more familiar John Locke. Locke’s significance to the study lies in the fact that the theory of property articulated in his Second Treatise on Government (1690) both relies on the concept of usufruct and undermines it in ways that foreshadow its gradual recession. While the Second Treatise contains usufructory provisos against waste and spoilage, Locke included these mainly as a way of protecting individual property rights, rather than stewarding resources that properly belong to God for the sake of others. Furthermore, Locke’s monetary theory, in which the fruits of labor are abstracted into capital, rendered concerns about waste and spoilage obsolete, as did his assumption that the European “discovery” of America opened up a limitless supply of land. By identifying these features of Locke’s thought, Drew illustrates how the usufructory ethos would come under increasing pressure as commerce and colonization came to define the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.