Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Collecting the World) by James Delbourgo is a thoughtful and comprehensive biography of the man whose collections became the foundation of the British Museum, Hans Sloane. Delbourgo’s central argument is that for Sloane, his collection practices were as much about collecting items as they were making connections with other collectors and valuable people, or as Delbourgo puts it, “collecting a world of things meant collecting a world of people.” James Delbourgo is the James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and received his Ph.D. from Columbia. He specializes in the Early Modern Atlantic World and the History of Science. His previous book, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America, published in 2006, details American experimentation with electricity. Delbourgo tells Sloane’s life story and legacy using Sloane’s correspondence, manuscripts, and published writings, also using Sloane’s surviving collections and catalogs. Collecting the World highlights the themes of colonization, trade, and state in Sloane’s life, using them to paint a complete and accurate picture of a man the public could easily lionize without this contextualization. Delbourgo’s detailed and contextualized portrayal of Sloane and his collection is not only an enjoyable read but an educational one that should be required reading for every historian of science and public historian as well as anyone with interests in British and museum History.
Collecting the World explores what collecting meant to Hans Sloane, not just the action of acquiring and cataloging but how he assembled, finessed, and his relationships with the people that would give and sell him the material goods that made up his collection. Delbourgo expertly weaves the story of Sloane and his collection by building on the themes of colonialism, statehood, slavery, and trade, all of which Sloane exploited to his advantage when building his legacy. Sloane’s relationships and interactions with people form the core of Collecting the World. Even when collecting specimens in Jamacia Sloane’s treatment of the enslaved men and women there, Delbourgo gives detailed information pulled from Sloane’s journals, correspondence, and notes regarding his interactions and opinions of the people he interacted with, both enslaved and free. The author highlights how Sloane’s opinions of people, mainly foreigners, and their customs impact how he recorded them in his collection. However, it was not only Sloane’s opinions that affected the collection. After Sloane’s death, parliament, out of fear, distrust, and disgust of the ‘commoner,’ does its best to prevent the lower classes from being admitted to the new British Museum.
Delbourgo splits Collecting the World into two parts. In the first, he argues that Sloane’s childhood in Ulster taught him to make the kinds of connections he would use later in life to expand his collection early, and the reader sees him use these connections to travel to Jamacia and begin his connections. In part two, Sloane uses his networking skills to rise in society and expand his collection. Delbourgo also highlights how Sloane and his collection profited from slavery and British Imperialism throughout Collecting the World. He discusses Sloane’s use of enslaved people in Jamacia to gather specimens, his marriage to his wife Elizabeth which brought him income from her plantations in Jamacia, and his interactions with the enslaved man Diallo are just some of the examples Delbourgo gives of Sloane profiting from slavery.
In Collecting the World, Delbourgo expertly conveys a nuanced, contextualized life story of Hans Sloane and the relationships he cultivated to form his collection of artifacts, manuscripts, and botanical and biological specimens worldwide. In part one, Delbourgo details Sloane’s childhood in Ulster and the foundations of his medical practice as a young adult in London before spending the other two-thirds of this section discussing his trip to Jamacia and the beginnings of his collection. In part two of Collecting the World, Sloane grows his practice, social standing, and collections in London alongside the Glorious Revolution and its ripples. Chapters two and three of Collecting the World focus on Sloane’s experiences in Jamacia, emphasizing how he benefited from the labor and culture of the enslaved men and women there. Particularly interesting in Chapter two, entitled “Island of Curiosities,” are Sloane’s medical case studies in which he not only documents how he treated both free and enslaved peoples and what he treated them for but also includes his opinions of them colored by the scientific racism of the period. Sloane was not a man prone to drink and found the culture of drinking on Jamacia disdainful; his advice to many of his patients to quit drinking for their health often went ignored, to their detriment and Sloane’s frustration. Chapter seven, “Creating the Public’s Museum,” begins with Sloane’s death in 1753 at the age of ninety-two. The chapter details the life of Sloane’s collections and the institution founded to hold them, The British Museum. Sloane’s will stipulated that “museum or collection be … visited and seen by all persons desirous of seeing and viewing the same … [and] rendered as useful as possible, as well towards satisfying the desire of the curious, as for the improvement, knowledge, and information of all persons.” All persons was a confounding phrase for parliament and the staff of the British Museum, whose disdain, mistrust, and lack of understanding of the lower classes caused them to do as much as they could to keep the public’s access to the Museum to a minimum.
Collecting the World is a powerful biography of Hans Sloane, and Delbourgo’s inclusion of slavery, colonialism, and trade as analytical themes makes Sloane’s life, collection, and the relationships behind them much fuller. His point that the British Museum and, therefore, Sloane’s collections are a lasting symbol of British Imperialism feels very poignant in relation to the call for the repatriation of artifacts to former colonial countries, a call the British Museum and its government has largely ignored. Collecting the World is a detailed accounting of Hans Sloane’s life and collections and adds to the field of knowledge in numerous ways. In addition to Sloane and his collections, Collecting the World gives detailed information on colonial Jamacia and its inhabitance, both enslaved and free, as well as its flora and fauna. Delbourgo’s book is an enthralling read by both specialist and non-specialist readers, especially those interested in the history of science, Imperial Britain, and museum history. Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane is a well-written, enthralling read that contextualizes the life and collections of Hans Sloane that anyone interested in the history of science, Imperial Britain, or museums should read.
