Description:

JAMES DELBOURGO
History, Rutgers University

TITLE How To Collect the World

Description: This talk explores the relationship between collecting things and collecting people in the career of Hans Sloane (1660-1753). Sloane is an understudied figure whose exploits have fallen into relative obscurity. This is especially surprising because his thousands of plant specimens survive almost completely intact in London's Natural History Museum; his library and correspondence remain at the core of the British Library; many of his artificial curiosities remain in the British Museum; and most of the catalogues in which he recorded his possessions also survive, making his perhaps the best documented natural history collection of the early modern period. Born in Ulster in 1660; Sloane travelled to the slave colony of Jamaica as a young man, published a Natural History of Jamaica in 2 volumes (1707-1725); became a wealthy society physician and naturalist and president of both the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians. In the half-century after his return from the Caribbean, income from his medical practice, offices, investments and his family’s slave plantations allowed him to amass a ‘universal’ collection through travellers operating around Britain’s expanding colonial system, from the West Indies to East Asia and beyond. On his death, he bequeathed his collection to the British nation in return for £20,000 and the British Museum, created by Act of Parliament in 1753, opened its doors in 1759. Sloane’s career is pivotal to understanding the transformation of a private encyclopaedic collection into a public museum in the context of global commerce and colonization. In Sloane’s case, collecting things entailed collecting people: through the networks by which he accessed curiosities from different parts of the world; and the social collectives generated by the collections themselves. This singular career sheds light on the relationship between early modern empire-building, universal knowledge and the foundation of public institutions in the Enlightenment.

Bio: 

James Delbourgo was educated at East Anglia, Cambridge (Christ's College) and Columbia, and has previously taught at McGill University, Montreal, where he directed the program in History and Philosophy of Science. His research combines the history of science with colonial and imperial history and, most recently, the history and sociology of collecting and museums. His first book explored the practice of bodily electrical experimentation in colonial British America and the early United States, assessing the larger meaning of the American Enlightenment through transatlantic and Creole scientific culture. Since then, he has co-edited two collections of essays and individually published essays on subjects ranging from underwater collecting and Caribbean salvage diving in the late seventeenth century to current art collecting practices in the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is currently completing a book on early modern global natural history collecting and the career of Hans Sloane, drawing on the histories of science, medicine and collecting, as well as Caribbean, imperial and global histories; and it is based on extensive research in Sloane's surviving specimens, objects, manuscripts and catalogues in London's Natural History Museum, the British Museum and the British Library. At Rutgers, he is active in the Program in the History of Science, Technology, Environment and Health (STEH). With Toby Jones he is co-director of the RCHA program for 2012-2015, “Networks of Exchange: Mobilities of Knowledge in a Globalized World.” His teaching includes Atlantic world history, history of science, collecting and museums, and the Enlightenment.

reception to follow