Chapter two delineates ‘the science of language’ as it developed from the philosophical speculations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder to the establishment of the ‘New Philology’ in the 1860s. Even as philosophers recognised significant continuities between birdsong, speech and poetry, they also, however, increasingly turned their attention to the internal, mental faculties as the distinguishing marks of an evolved and uniquely human language. This chapter examines the wider implications of a developing equation of language and thought in the long nineteenth century. The apparent absence of language in animals was widely seen to reflect a lack of intelligence, reason or even consciousness. Since language reflected the unique faculties of the human mind, philosophers of all stripes raced to discover an intrinsic set of principles common to all human languages throughout time and across continents. According to this same principle, however, differences between languages were also seen to reflect or even determine differences in the minds of their speakers. As they responded to these larger debates, scientists and poets throughout this period, from William Wordsworth to Charles Darwin, reflected on their personal experiences and the notorious difficulty they habitually encountered in attempting to translate their own thoughts into words.

The introductory chapter outlines the book’s approach to renderings of birdsong in poems. It addresses recent studies which have emphasised the dangers of anthropomorphism and the poet’s consequent propensity to make the sounds of nature, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘tell back the tale | Of his own sorrow’ (‘The Nightingale’, 1796). As the ethologist and primatologist Frans de Waal has argued, however, this scholarly obsession with anthropomorphism all too frequently slides into a form of what he terms ‘anthropodenial’: ‘the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals’ which ‘denotes wilful blindness to the human-like characteristics of animals or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves’ and ‘reflects a pre-Darwinian antipathy to the profound similarities between human and animal behaviour (e.g. maternal care, sexual behaviour, power seeking) noticed by anyone with an open mind’ (‘Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial’, 2009). While de Waal has called for a more open-minded approach to the study of our nearest relatives, the primates, this book sketches out a long history of ‘wilful blindness’ towards birdsong as an everyday example of the agency, skill and artfulness possessed by other creatures.

Since birds have been trained to sing for centuries, the scientific studies of birdsong examined in chapter one drew from an old and deep well of popular knowledge and experience. Naturalists relied on a mass of supporting evidence from an ancient and evidently lucrative trade in singing birds. The chapter examines records of bird-catching from eighteenth-century training manuals to Henry Mayhew’s extended discussion of the metropolitan ‘bird-trade’ in London Labour and The London Poor (1851) and the eventual decline of the London chaffinch-fanciers as recounted in W. H. Hudson’s Birds in London (1898). It then assesses the importance of this popular and highly competitive sport to an emerging scientific method based on practical experience, direct observation and controlled experiment. While Daines Barrington and Gilbert White observed apposite similarities between birdsong and human speech, the chapter observes an irregularity in how their studies were received: Barrington’s findings were relegated to the footnotes and appendices of natural history throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The chapter concludes by showing how this wealth of material was excavated from the footnotes and explicitly used to identify birdsong as ‘the nearest analogy’ to human speech in Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871).

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.

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first provides an overview of the Age of Aspirations, from approximately the 1780s to the 1920s. This period was marked by an intense exploration of arbitration in all its forms. In private relations, arbitration was commonly used to settle commercial disputes, for example through the many trade associations in Europe. In the public arena, when used among states, arbitration was seen as a way of fostering peace and stability. The Age of Aspirations lasted until the 1920s, when arbitral institutions were founded, the importance of merchants and statesmen yielded to that of members of these arbitral institutions, and various efforts were made to recognize the validity of arbitration clauses. The second section of this chapter is more theoretical and looks at how a history of international commercial arbitration may be written. It explores various historical methods and approaches, and draws attention to methodological pitfalls that may be encountered when studying the history of international arbitration, especially its distant origins.