Delbourgo, James. Collecting the World : the Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane. London: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2017.
James Delbourgo is a historian at Rutgers specializing in early modern Atlantic history, the history of science, and museology. In his 2017 work, Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane, Delbourgo takes the reader through a meticulously researched journey into the life of a collector from whose work rose the British Museum, Sir Hans Sloane. Delbourgo’s book, ostensibly a biography of Hans Sloane, unveils itself as much a cultural history as chronicle of Hans Sloane with the gentleman scholar serving as a lens through which the reader can contextualize how a gentleman collector transformed a love of natural history into a cultural and scholarly institution. Complete with incredible images of Sloane’s remarkable collection and analysis of 18th century discourse between the state and science, Delbourgo’s Collecting the World for anybody interested in early modern scientific thought.
Covering in incredible detail the processes by which Sloane amassed his foundational collection, Delbourgo’s work develops as Sloane’s collection grows, revealing the imperial, colonial, scientific, interconnected, and personal mechanisms by which Sloane accumulated his collection, his personal wealth, and global renown. The argument of the book is simultaneously revealed as Delbourgo dissects Sloane’s collection; Sloane, though an incredible figure contemporaneously and historically, amassed his collection through a personal approach to natural history and benefitted from the societal changes Britain underwent in the late 17th and 18th centuries. In short, Sloane was the perfect man to amass such a collection during an era of complex societal change. As Delbourgo Says, “Sloane realized his dream of universal knowledge through a brilliant alignment of institutions of state, trade and colonization to serve his personal ambition,” (xxix).
Delbourgo’s approach to this work mirrors the institution he chronicles, weaving a public audience through various intellectual and cultural processes in an easily digestible fashion. Much as a museum-goer would tour through the wonderous halls of the British Museum, so to does the reader glance at the world that Sloane inhabited through a written tour of the 18th century Atlantic World. Delbourgo’s work is separated into two parts: “Empire of Curiosities,” and “Assembling the world.” Part one follows Sloane as he becomes an internationally recognized natural historian. Part two follows Sloane as he amasses a fortune of bullion and curiosities, finally leaving his life’s work to a public in flux.
Part one of Delbourgo’s work has Jamaica at its center. Sloane, the attending physician to the Duke of Albemarle, was in that rare group that benefitted from his employer’s death, as the demise of the aristocrat allowed Sloane to traipse around Jamaica, both performing as a physician and collecting specimens. In these early chapters the reader sees Sloane fascination with materials and the natural world, but the reader also sees that Sloane is very much a man of his era. Sloane’s fascination with cultural materials did not translate into any apathy for the institutions of slavery and colonization. Sloane subscribed to the racial, imperial, and protestant justifications for colonization, often treating the enslaved people he encountered with apathy if not contempt. As Delbourgo says, Sloane “absorbed the instinctive violence toward slaves of his planter hosts,” (51). While in part one Sloane’s desire for universal knowledge culminates in an avid pursuit of natural history and material, in his mind universal knowledge did not need extend to the cultural practices of enslaved peoples, blacks, or native peoples. Part one also introduces us to Sloane the networker, as one of his many gifts seemed to be his ability to maintain correspondences and networks. In an age of scientific interconnectedness, Sloane’s ability to master the collection of people as well as specimens is in great part why he was able to amass a such a grand collection. To Delbourgo’s credit, he does not shy away from portraying Sloane as ignorant in matters such as ethnography. Sloane was a man of empire, science, and mercantilism, often collecting and describing objects and materials based on their commercial benefit, and ignoring the harm that his imperial dispossession may have had on the ecologies or cultures he interacted with.
Part two of the book follows Sloane after his return from Jamaica. In the half-century after his scientific and professional voyage to Jamaica, he never left England again. Instead, the world came to Sloane as he amassed a fortune due to a successful medical practice, land holdings, and money from Jamaican sugar plantations. Because of his reputation as a sober and empirical gentleman, Sloane rose rapidly through the ranks of London’s high society, increasing his collection as he climbed the social ladder. While part one dealt many with Sloane’s natural history efforts in the west indies, part two shows Sloane as a man of the world despite never leaving the comfort of his home at Chelsea manor. Sloane’s wealth allowed him to collect the work of his peers, often spending his wealth of the collections of his diseased colleagues. His renown and wealth also brought many to his door, eager to use Sloan to increase their wealth and social status. Sloane had connections with physicians in far flung EIC colonies, the settlers in the frontiers of North America, and courtiers at various palaces in Europe. All of them contributed, either in material or expertise, to Sloane’s great collection. It is in part two that the reader sees Sloane as something of a paradox, a scientist who rarely does science. A man of letters who perfected the art of collecting rather than fieldwork. Sloane’s true genius, as we see in the second half of Delbourgo’s work, was his ability to accumulate and catalogue material while simultaneously sparking public interest in his science. To the lucky few whom Sloane gave tours to prior to his death, Sloane’s collection was not a testament to the eccentricity of a scholar, but a testament of empire and the possibility of true, universal knowledge.
A strength of Delbourgo’s work is the depth of research into the periphery of Sloane’s life. From the criticisms of titanic figures such as Isaac Newton to polemics such as William King, peripheral figures in the book (though it is hard to call Newton as such in any discussion of turn of the 18th century science) show that despite the empirical tendencies of Sloane, detractors such as Newton and King represent a scientific community and culture writ large as grappling with the nature and meaning of knowledge-making. Newton described natural history as “the handmaid of natural philosophy” and King frequently bemoaned the 18th century notion that scientific learning was becoming diluted by commercialism and early global trade, calling Sloane a “master of scraps.” Delbougo does a marvelous job highlighting the contentiousness, accusations of credulity, rivalry, and connection with empire that took place during 18th century scientific culture in the blossoming British Empire.
Though Delbourgo’s depth and breadth of research is impressive, occasionally he seems to miss the forest for the trees. The connections Sloane enjoyed with far flung collectors is examined in excruciating detail. Delbourgo often goes on tangent’s about English commercial attempts to penetrate Tokugawa Japan or Qing China, but spends little time examining the ecological and cultural impacts of Sloane’s collection. While Delbourgo admittedly does spend a great deal of time discussing the impact of slavery on Sloane’s collection (and this is appreciated greatly), not nearly enough time is spent discussing the impact of collecting on natural environments and indigenous cultures. What does it say about Sloane and the nature of empire and the colonial state, for example, that a physician could collect so many curiosities from cultures and ecologies that were simultaneously being destroyed as Sloane collected their relics? By definition, a collection bears with it the implication of disuse, so when Sloane collected peace pipes from Native Americans or drums from coastal Africans, this act functioned symbolically as a death knell for these cultures. Postcolonial theories such as dispossession of indigenous material and culture is not discussed at length, and the work is almost entirely devoid any connection between mercantilism and science and the destruction of cultures through accumulation of resources. Since Delbourgo is writing a biography, a form of historiography almost certainly geared toward the general public, an in-depth discussion of post-colonial theory can be forgiven. Nevertheless, since the majority of public readership will not come into contact with in-depth postcolonial theory, it is incumbent on the author of a work describing the complex relationship between colonialism, mercantilism, and culture to acknowledge the cultural erasure inherent to this 18th century form of natural history.
Upon Sloane’s death, his collection became a concern of the state as well as science. Issues of finances and who had the right to access the collection plagued the opening of the British Museum, sparking a debate about the nature of the public and the reach of the state almost a half century before the American and French Revolutions. Sloane’s bequeathal of his life’s work to the viewing pleasure of the public and the research of scholars sparked a debate about access to scientific and historical materials that is ongoing to this day. Because of this ongoing issue, Collecting the World is an excellent entry into the history of museology and the history of science.
