If you’ve ever wondered how the British Museum got its start as the first free, universally accessible museum, this book will tell you. The museum began from a collection bequeathed to the nation by Sir Hans Sloane, who spent an extraordinarily long life acquiring a wide variety of objects from around the world. This story is told in an extraordinarily long book with three sets of colour plates as well as plenty of black-and-white illustrations. I found this book interesting but it was a bit of a slog around Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, as Sloane’s collection simply grew for growth’s sake and he himself didn’t do as much of the collecting in person — people would send him things instead because they knew he was a famous collector. If you’re short of time, read the last chapter, which is the one that actually discusses the establishment of the British Museum and the challenges faced by the trustees as they attempted to carry out Sloane’s wishes.

I would not discourage anyone from reading this, particularly if they’re already on an Enlightenment kick, but be prepared to buckle in for the long haul. ( )

Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was a collector. That is, he was insatiably curious about the world and collected artefacts from anyone, anywhere and on just about any subject. Primarily interested in botany and medical items, he saw no boundaries to his passion and built a personal collection including books, pictures, plants (pictures, dried samples, seeds, fruits, live specimens), animals (birds/mammals/fish/insects, dead and alive, whole or parts), manufactured items, tools, minerals (gems, mineral samples, stones) and much, much more amounting to hundreds of thousands of individual objects. In his lifetime he was acknowledged as the pre-eminent collector in the western world.

Why is he so important? In his will he left his collection to the nation and this became the founding set of objects in the British Museum, then as now a major museum across the world and created specifically to be accessed freely by anyone, not just scholars or higher class patrons. To this day the British Museum is open to everyone, with no entrance fee, being funded by a mixture of government grant, donations and its own commercial operations.

Why did Sloane collect and what did he do with it? What in Sloane's personality drove him to collect is unclear, and this book gives us very little about the man himself and his habits, but he expected to gain prestige (my collection is bigger and better than yours...) and influence (through an extraordinary large network of field agents supplying artefacts and peers in the scientific world with whom he could discuss them. Sloane's main focus was not in analysing and using his artefacts for research; he saw that as a job for others. His attention was on cataloging his finds to document what they were, their provenance (where they came from, who supplied them and in what circumstances) and, not trivially, where they were physically in his storage spaces. Perhaps a companion piece to this book is Alex Wright's 'Cataloging the World', a biography of Paul Otlet who had similar ambitions and is regarded by many as the 'father' of modern technologies as the web, hypertext, wikipedia and more.

This is a fascinating story, although I found the telling a little dry and academic at times, with an understandable tendency to drift into listicle territory now and then. Delbourgo has grasped the enormity of Sloane's achievement and placed it in the context of its time for a modern audience to get their heads around.

Most entertaining, Mr. Sloane. ( )

John Wilkins, a founder of the Royal Society, in 1668 tried to devise a language to classify every thing in the world. But his classifications were arbitrary, not natural or rational. Borges parodied Wilkins in an example of an imaginary 'Chinese encyclopaedia entitled the Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge, which sorted animals a) belonging to the emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) suckling pigs ... h) included in the present classification...k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) etcetera.'
This reference shows the problem Hans Sloane had in ordering, classifying and listing the thousands of objects and manuscripts he collected - and which became the British Museum in 1753. [This imaginary encyclopaedia makes it into Delbourgo's index under 'China'.] Delbourgo is usefully read beside Ritvo (1997) and Trevor Roper's biography of Mayerne, an earlier society doctor (who was considerably more modern than Sloane - a leechy Galenist)
Collecting the World has a strange referencing style (one long note per paragraph), but you get used to it. It is extremely well served by endnotes, bibliography and index which run for 150 pages.
It is interesting on British slavery, tracing Sloane's investment returns from the good ship Neptune in the triangular trade taking slaves to the Caribbean, sugar to London and trade goods to West Africa. This sets the material background for his collecting - and for his own work in Jamaica as a naturalist.
The book itself is interestingly illustrated and scrupulously proof read. Indexing 'Hermes Trimegistus' as Trismegistus, Hermes must therefore be a conscious decision. ( )