Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum by James Delbourgo (review)

The British Museum opened a permanent gallery in 2003 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding: "Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century." Printed materials available in the exhibit today define the Age of Enlightenment as "a time when people — including the collectors who created the British Museum — used reason and first-hand observation of the world around them to understand it in new ways."

The Museum continues to describe itself as an "Enlightenment" institution, despite a long and contentious discourse on the dark side of eighteenth-century British history: colonial expansion and the often-catastrophic cultural devastation that traveled in its wake. This is important in terms of the Museum's collections, because concepts of enlightenment and universality continue to be used to avoid difficult conversations about the repatriation of cultural property to descendant communities.

James Delbourgo's book, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum, is timely for giving us a deeply researched background on Hans Sloane (1660–1753), whose collections and ideas formed the nucleus of the Museum. Understanding the historical and cultural context in which Sloane worked and collected allows us to appreciate both the curiosity and effort that went into building a collection that represented every part of the world then known to British merchants and adventurers, and to acknowledge the casual racism and cruelty that frequently underpinned it.

Sloane travelled to Jamaica in 1687 as physician to the British governor and while there observed and gathered specimens of local plants and animals, as well as stories and cultural artifacts of Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. He engaged artists and assistants to help him document his work in drawings and in collections, including a phenomenal herbarium that still survives at the British Museum and is the basis for his two-volume Natural History of Jamaica (1707/1725).

Upon his return to London, Sloane developed an elite clientele of patients and bought substantial property in Bloomsbury and Chelsea (Sloane Square is named for him). Though he never returned to Jamaica, his marriage to the widow of a planter he met there brought him additional wealth from a plantation with an enslaved workforce.

Sloane continued to amass broad collections for the rest of his life, partly through purchase (including several other whole collections), but also through trade with scientists and antiquaries, and by gifts sent to him from a vast correspondence across Europe. As president of both the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians, Sloane participated in and influenced important scientific discourse; his circle included Isaac Newton, Samuel Pepys, Edmond Halley, John Evelyn, and Carl Linnaeus. He epitomized, as Delbourgo writes, "a gentleman naturalist visibly immersed in commercial worlds of goods and commodities yet who claimed to be an impartial man of letters" (172).

When he died in 1753, having lived an extraordinarily long life, Sloane's greatest legacy was his final act, which left his collection of over 70,000 objects to the British government to form the "first free national public museum," which opened in January 1759 (xxi). It takes Delbourgo a long time to get to the founding of the British Museum; we do not read about it until after more than 300 pages of background, not only on Hans Sloane, but with digressions that explain social, political, and military movements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the technology of sugar production, and the histories of the East India Company and the Glorious Revolution.

Delbourgo's last chapter gives us perceptive insights on what has remained constant and what has changed at the British Museum in the years between its founding and our post-colonial present day. The dispersal of Sloane's collections (most of which still survive) among several institutions that focus on different scholarly disciplines "has proven a stubborn obstacle to understanding the totality of what he did...