Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 315

In the 1990s and early 2000s the environmental humanities were mostly either indifferent or actively hostile to the pre-Romantic eighteenth century. The period was characterized by the supposedly pernicious, anthropocentric, and instrumentalizing discourse of ‘improvement’ associated with the Agricultural Revolution. In the last decade, however, historians and ecocritics have sought to recover a greater diversity of eighteenth-century thought about the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature. One early call for re-evaluation was the 2011 Literature Compass article ‘Ecocriticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies’ by Erin Drew and John Sitter. Now Drew, in her first book, identifies an alternative, parallel discourse to that of improvement, which she argues was culturally influential and pervasive: the usufructuary ethos.

Usufruct is a concept in ancient Roman law, referring to the temporary right to hold and use someone else’s property, with the condition that the property must not be damaged or altered. The term entered English law in the seventeenth century and theologians used it to theorize the relationship between God, humans, and the nonhuman world: God owned his creation in perpetuity, and humans held only temporary rights over the earth, with a responsibility to steward the land, plants, and animals in their usufructuary possession. While humans were superior to and empowered to use the natural world, due to their higher position in the hierarchy of being, the usufructuary principle meant that that power was ethically limited. The wider ‘usufructuary ethos’ that Drew argues developed in England from this theory included various ‘moral conclusions’ (p. 16). Drew claims that thinkers and writers (if not actual landowners or farmers) used usufruct to conceptualize moral obligations towards both nonhuman creatures and the future generations of humans who would inherit that usufruct.

The first chapter outlines how seventeenth-century jurists, theologians, and philosophers, including Matthew Hale, Richard Allestree, and John Locke, developed theories of humans’ usufruct of the earth. Drew seeks to show that the ethic of care which grew from the usufructuary ethos was both interspecies and intergenerational, involving all creatures, past, present, and future, in a network of reciprocal obligation. This reading might at first appear too optimistic. A responsibility for the world does not automatically equate to a responsibility towards the world, and for some writers on usufruct, care of the earth was the fulfilment of an obligation to God alone, not to the other humans or nonhumans who might incidentally benefit from that care. However, as Drew brings in more examples of the usufructuary ethos shaping different areas of thought, a picture does emerge of writers using usufruct to think about the rights of both humans and nonhumans, present and future. The ‘Trust and Stewardship’ of creatures that God has invested in humans, Hale wrote in 1676, creates a ‘Justice that is due from Men to them’ (p. 40).

The ‘moral conclusions’ of the usufructuary ethos shape the eighteenth-century literary texts that Drew examines in the following chapters. Chapter 2 focuses on literature about trees by John Evelyn, Anne Finch, and John Philips. These authors (all royalist Tories) portray the ideal usufructuary landlord as a gentleman-farmer whose paternalistic care of his human dependents and descendants is practically and ethically continuous with his care for the trees on his estate. In their capacity to provide food and shelter for multiple beings beyond the lifespan of a human, trees are significant in these texts as ‘organisms whose unique biological traits create both symbolic and ecologically literal connections among other beings and across generations – if landlords protect and steward them properly’ (p. 65). The combination of the symbolic and the literal here is an important corrective to the twentieth-century tendency to read eighteenth-century representations of nature as always and only symbols of culture (e.g., an oak tree as a symbol of the Stuart line). Drew demonstrates that nonhumans could be simultaneously figurative and material in eighteenth-century thought.

Chapter 3 addresses Alexander Pope and the critiques in his poetry of the improper pursuit and use of riches for purposes other than ‘benefit to public and posterity’ (p. 103). When Drew reads Pope’s poetry about land use in the context of the usufructuary ethos, seemingly simple condemnations of greed, luxury, and vanity become part of a larger, georgic-inflected argument that ‘value is [not] human beings’ to bestow on nature through their use’, but rather ‘an inherent quality that they honor through proper use’ (p. 118). Any use the landlord makes of his riches (either money or natural resources) must be an investment in and for a multispecies and multigenerational community.

Drew makes clear throughout that part of the reason writers were so eager to promote the usufructuary ethos was their recognition that landowners and farmers were increasingly ‘understand[ing] the environment as wealth generating, rather than sustaining’ (p. 139). Chapter 4 examines what Drew calls the ‘midcentury mercantile monoculture georgics’ (p. 18), John Dyer’s poem on the wool trade, The Fleece (1757), and James Grainger’s colonial plantation georgic The sugar-cane (1764). Chapter 1’s analysis of Philips’ Cyder (1708), the first English formal georgic, revealed this Virgilian genre to be particularly adaptable to the usufructuary ethos, and Drew thereby contributes to the ongoing critical construction of what David Fairer has called ‘eco-georgic’. But Drew shows in Chapter 4 how Dyer and Grainger were able to manipulate a classical genre and traditional usufructuary rhetoric to endorse new and often catastrophic social, economic, and environmental practices, including slavery.

The usufructuary ethos is an important contribution to eighteenth-century studies, revealing a significant strand of social and environmental thought in the period. It reminds us that a varied range of attitudes to the nonhuman world, some destructive and some proto-conservationist, were held and articulated in the eighteenth century (and that different attitudes could be held by one person or expressed in one text). In her conclusion, Drew makes some tentative suggestions for how the cultural history of the usufructuary ethos might be relevant to environmental concerns in the twenty-first century. She suggests that the most pertinent, and most disturbing, lesson from this history might be that the cultural prominence of conservationist arguments was, and is, no protection against the onrush of the Anthropocene.