'Nature is of God': Land, Money, Empire and Extraction in James Harrington's Legal Thought, 1656-60

In 1659, the English radical republican theorist James Harrington published one of his last works: a 10-page pamphlet of 76 aphorisms. The 22nd and shortest stated plainly 'Nature is of God'. Unpacking this otherwise enigmatic line, this article examines Harrington's changing uses of 'nature' as part of his thinking on law and empire, and argues that an early form of extractivism can be found in Harrington's thought. In the early, secular account in his most well-known work, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), Harrington presented a utopian plan that rested on land tenure reorganisation where the justice of empire depended on the control over land and law. Harrington articulated this vision through botanical and natural metaphors that underlie Oceana's messianic mission to spread its laws and constitution through the world by assimilating territory and extracting resources. In Harrington's late 1650s works, a more religiously-inflected form of these arguments expanded on this duty and offered more systematic accounts of the connection of nature, empire and law that involved a deeper engagement with divine and natural law. Finally, in his last, unpublished work, The Mechanics of Nature (1660), Harrington briefly sketched an account of 'animal spirits' and the common order of nature and humanity. Beginning with the declaration 'Nature is the fiat', Mechanics brought together themes of sovereign declaratory power, circulation and redistribution, linked to the nascent extractivism in Harrington's earlier works.