Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane by James Delbourgo is an honest look at natural history collection in the early modern period by examining Hans Sloane’s collections that led to the foundation of the British Museum. James Delbourgo is an English historian of science and the early modern Atlantic world with a focus on the history of collection and museums. He earned his Master’s in Philosophy from Cambridge in 1997 and his Ph.D. from Columbia in 2003. Since 2008, Delbourgo has been a professor at Rutgers University teaching undergraduate courses on the history of science and the Enlightenment. Collecting the World is Delbourgo’s most recent book, published in 2017, and is based on “15 years of research in Sloane’s surviving London collections in collaboration with the British Museum,” (https://history.rutgers.edu/faculty-directory/307-delbourgo-james). Though based in New York City, Delbourgo is a consultant to the British Museum where he works to present “the historic links between Sloane and his collections to slavery, the African diaspora and the British Empire for the general public,” (https://history.rutgers.edu/faculty-directory/307-delbourgo-james). Collecting the World emphasizes this facet of the early modern world by highlighting the contributions of the enslaved and indigenous populations of the Caribbean who were instrumental in Sloane’s process of collecting natural history specimen which became the bulk of the British Museum’s collections at its founding in 1753.
Collecting the World follows the life and career of Hans Sloane, a man of science whose childhood in Ulster in the ruling Protestant minority of the majority Irish Catholic population influenced his positive view of colonization in the burgeoning British Empire. These experiences shaped how Sloane viewed the world and influenced the process by which he collected natural items to categorize and publish in his work the Natural History of Jamaica as an adult. James Delbourgo argues that Sloane’s career in the pursuit of science and knowledge in the early modern period, (and by extension his wealth, fame, and the origins of the modern museum) were built on the rapid commercial and colonial expansion of the British Empire that profited from the Atlantic slave trade. Delbourgo supplements this argument through his extensive archival research into Sloane’s collections housed at the British Museum which include his published work, manuscripts, correspondence and the surviving specimens and objects and their respective catalogues (xxix).
Though it is written in a manner more familiar to those who have a background in scholarly literature, this book is accessible to anyone who wishes to learn more about the origins of the modern public museum and the world of collecting. It contains copious images of sketches, etchings, and photographs of the surviving items in Sloane’s collection at the British Museum to visually aid the reader. In addition, this book is a clearly written and concise depiction of the life of Hans Sloane and the impact of colonization, trade and the global exchange of ideas that influenced his career. It makes compelling and straightforward arguments about Sloane’s role in the foundation of the modern museum and his role in profiting from the exploitation of enslaved labor and colonial expansion. What this book accomplishes is acknowledging Hans Sloane and his contributions to early modern science but removes him from a pedestal so that the reader understands how these contributions were achieved and the impacts of the global system from which they were forged.
Within the historiography of early modern science and the “scientific revolution,” this book sets itself apart since Hans Sloane, the author argues, has been a long neglected scientific figure due to the complexity and difficulty of his story. Delbourgo claims that in popular history there is an emphasis on the “physical” sciences of figures like Isaac Newton, while “social” forms of science like Sloane’s were overshadowed by more popular contemporary figures like Carolus Linnaeus. In addition, there is a complexity to this history since he was a collector of natural history specimens that profited from the “disturbing world of Atlantic slavery… [which] has proven a far harder story to tell,” (xxiii). And previously there were physical limitations to the study of Hans Sloane. His collections were divided up, some portions destroyed, and others left to rot. In Collecting the World, James Delbourgo attempted, for the first time, to examine Sloane’s complicated life through surviving artifacts and published works.
To map Hans Sloane’s life, Delbourgo divided Collecting the World into two distinct parts. The first part of the book, chapters one through three, look at his colonial origins in Ireland, his education in continental Europe, and his travels to the Caribbean. And the second part, chapters four through seven, focuses on his life in London after his travels, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, as he established himself as a physician and a collector. Chapter one is a study of Sloane’s early life in Ulster, much of the area we now know as Northern Ireland, and the Protestant/Catholic tensions that he faced as a child in a colonized area of the British Empire. Delbourgo argues that growing up in an area familiar with colonization impacted how Sloane viewed the expansion of the British Empire across the Atlantic and impacted his work as a collector and how he viewed the scientific world. Chapters two and three are arguably the most important chapters of the book. They provide a detailed description of British colonial expansion and the Atlantic slave trade and Sloane’s encounters with the institution during his time in Jamaica. These years greatly influenced how and what he collected, including his exploitation of enslaved labor to collect natural history specimens. These included local flora, fauna, and the tools and musical instruments of the indigenous and enslaved populations of the island. These chapters are supplemented with sketches from his travels, illustrations and maps to detail the intricacies of the early modern Atlantic world.
Chapter four details his professional establishment as a physician in London, his marriage, and the process of the publication of the Natural History of Jamaica, which compiled his collections on paper. Here, Sloane found himself in the middle of Britain’s “growing empire of goods,” which allowed for social mobility in a society of unequal wealth (147). Chapter five details Sloane’s continued interest in collecting, with the author describing him as a “collector of collections.” This chapter is a detailed look at the scientific world of early modern Europe and the exchange of knowledge that occurred internationally. Chapters six and seven are a description of the culmination of Sloane’s efforts of collection. They detail the organization, cataloguing and labelling efforts of his personal museum and the subsequent foundation of the British Museum from stipulations that he drew up in his will. From start to finish this book argues that Hans Sloane’s status in the scientific world, and the origins of the modern museum, were built on the rapid expansion of the British Empire through the Atlantic slave trade and the vast exchange of scientific knowledge across Europe in the early modern period. Overall, Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane is a detailed and well-researched book which thoroughly examines the complexities of the early modern world with very little, if anything, to criticize.
