The chapter analyses the integral role that literary writing in English, and especially the realist novel, played in imaginatively shaping, structuring and on occasion obscuring processes of nineteenth-century globalization. Taking Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) as case studies, we make two main points: first, that empire formed the constitutive ground of processes of globalization in the period; and, second, that realist fiction provided a means through which these processes could be understood and questioned, from vantage points both metropolitan or northern (Dickens) and peripheral or southern (Schreiner). We proceed in this chapter on the conviction that imperialism was an essential aspect of globalization throughout the long nineteenth century, redistributing wealth and restructuring the global economy in favour of imperial power. Globalization and empire were therefore folded into one another, taking on different features at their geographic and economic cores and peripheral edges. Taking illustrative examples from Dickens in the heart of the Empire and Schreiner at a zone of peripheral extraction, the chapter captures two contrasting yet complementary literary responses to this system.

In this chapter I take up two texts from the 1880s to demonstrate how evolutionary theory mandated formal experimentation in fiction. In both Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (completed in 1884 but not published until 1903), that experimentation appears most clearly in idiosyncratic narrative point of view: Schreiner narrates a section of her novel in first-person plural, while the whole of Butler’s novel is narrated in what I call first-person omniscient point of view. Arguing for a return to and reinvigoration of the study of relations between evolution and literary form inaugurated by Gillian Beer and George Levine in the 1980s, I also broaden the scope of that study beyond Darwin. Not Darwinism but Herbert Spencer’s universalist progressivism stands behind Schreiner’s first-person plural point of view, while Butler’s narration takes shape in connection with his own peculiar brand of Lamarckism. Finally, each of these novels of the 1880s elaborates a theory of historicity derived from the same evolutionary thinking to which anomalies in point of view can be traced, a theory that requires us to interrogate the view of history encoded in the phrase ‘of the 1880s.’

In this chapter I examine how indigenous South African animals, especially those used for capital, reinforced or rejected liberal imperial ideologies. I focus on the ostrich, native to South Africa and first domesticated by British colonists in the 1860s, and argue that even though ostriches were seen as ungovernable, colonists fostered their lives; as such both animal minds and bodies were controlled by British liberal imperialism. I then show how Oliver Schreiner’s essays, letters, and best-selling novel The Story of an African Farm conceptualize animals outside liberal imperial discourses and suggest that animality – in the form of animal–animal relationships and animal epistemology – offers alternate political models for human relationships within the space of empire especially. Through her portrayal of the ostrich, meerkats, and birds, Schreiner offers an animal politics that invites readers to rethink negative conceptions of animality and, by extension, liberal imperial discourses that operate within a speciesist logic.

This chapter explores intersections between animals produced for human consumption, liberal inclusion, and biopolitics, another strategy of governmentality. I first examine mid-century cattle industry reform and concerns over the treatment of animals raised for human consumption. By embracing notions of animal capital and profit to better regulate animal lives, animal welfare discourse showed how animal bodies can negatively or positively affect the wealth of the nation, depending on their treatment. I contrast this biopolitical discourse with Thomas Hardy’s concerns over the treatment of cattle, and his desire for animal justice and equality. After examining his own animal welfare, especially concerns about the cattle industry, I analyze his novel about shepherding and pastoral power, Far from the Madding Crowd, which employs what I call an affirmative biopolitical realism. Through focusing on the lives of sheep and enhancing them with his biopolitical realist techniques, Hardy offers an alternative ethic for relating with animals that values animals outside capitalist discourses of profit, ultimately positing a liberal inclusion that welcomes animals.