The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century. By Erin Drew

Abstract

Erin Drew’s The Usufructuary Ethos is a focused and impactful study of the little-known concept of usufruct in the culture of early capitalism. Usufruct, Drew explains, is a concept that has its origins in Roman property law, and which designates the “right of temporary possession, use, or enjoyment of the advantages of property belonging to another” (1). A usufructuary is contractually permitted to make use of some property, but he is not himself the owner of that property; his use of that property is therefore limited to uses that are in accordance with the owner’s terms—and which do not damage the property for other present and future users. The Usufructuary Ethos joins the recent effort amongst scholars within eighteenth-century studies to show how a period that is often associated with the anthropocentric instrumentalization of nature in fact held its own well-established forms of environmentalism. Across four chapters, an introduction, and brief coda, Drew shows how a variety of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts took up usufructuary discourse and its associated metaphors as a way to establish human beings’ limited authority over the natural world, whose true owner was God (2). Moreover, as Drew explains, this emphasis on humans’ relative subordination encouraged a widespread view of “the world as an interspecies, intergenerational network of obligation and dependence in which each organism carries moral significance” (3).