Bird Class: Alexander Wilson and the Shadow of Capital

In “Bird Class: Alexander Wilson and the Shadow of Capital,” Michael Ziser examines Alexander Wilson’s monumental American Ornithology (1808-1814), the first fully illustrated compendium of North American birds,... [ view full abstract ]

In “Bird Class: Alexander Wilson and the Shadow of Capital,” Michael Ziser examines Alexander Wilson’s monumental American Ornithology (1808-1814), the first fully illustrated compendium of North American birds, using the details of Wilson’s life and writing to explore the economic determinants of natural histories. Reflective of its origins in Wilson’s early labors in Scotland as a shepherd, silk weaver, itinerant pedlar, and political dissident, the book speaks in occulted ways of the turn-of-the-19^th-century economic upheavals that pushed Wilson from his Ayrshire weaving shed into the Scottish countryside, then into the cities and forests of the young United States, and eventually to his death from overwork in 1813. What does the experience of indebtedness have to do with the form and character of a book about birds?  What does it mean that Wilson’s ornithological expeditions in America formally mirror his early retailing and bookselling ventures in the Scottish backcountry?  How did the early industrialization of the countryside in both Scotland and the US shape what could be said of the nonhuman?  And to what degree are Wilson’s associations between poetry, science, power, and class baked into the long subsequent history of popular ornithology in the US?