There are few people who would deny that the British Museum’s history is steeped in colonialism. Apologists have chosen to gloss over this past by claiming the Museum now has a special status as a universal museum. James Delbourgo’s new biography of Hans Sloane, Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane, should make them think again, and give pause for deep reflection to all museums with colonial connections.
Delbourgo charts Sloane’s rise from an Ulster-born outsider to a wealthy, well-connected member of the London elite. En route Sloane became physician to the governor of Jamaica, an event that would transform his life. It not only conferred status to the nascent physician, it was here that Sloane collected the specimens that made up his Natural History of Jamaica and established him as a significant collector. The trip also led to his marriage to the widow of a plantation owner, giving him an income from sugar production that would help sustain his future collecting. As Delbourgo makes clear, Sloane’s collecting was only achieved through his complicity in slavery and colonialism.
It is hard to find any redeeming features in Sloane’s character when reading about his time in Jamaica. With a colonial, capitalist outlook, Sloane saw the Jamaican landscape as containing commodities to be owned, traded and used by white English owners. His treatment of slaves was abhorrent. He was brutal to them as patients and documented their public torture and execution without emotion or intervention. He considered “Indians and blacks” as specimens to be inspected and scrutinised. His writing amplified racist stereotypes, while his accounts of sugar production erased the slaves whose labour created it.
And yet it was the Jamaican landscape and natural history that established Sloane as a collector of repute, and it was slaves who did some of that collecting for him. Their contribution was, of course, written out of Natural History of Jamaica, alongside the artists and engravers whose meticulous drawings recorded specimens and illustrated the book. Sloane the arriviste was not acknowledging anyone else.
Delbourgo elegantly details the way in which Sloane’s collecting and scientific and medical practices combined to further all elements of his life. Sloane’s rising status in his practice provided him with huge wealth and a network of contacts throughout the expanding empire. And through this network he expanded his collections. Delbourgo places this story against a deftly woven backdrop of political and social contexts and histories of science and medicine to create a rich and compelling account.
There are parts of Collecting the World that will ring true for present-day curators, particularly the logistics of documenting and cataloguing the collections. The catalogues give pause for reflection on the ways knowledge is created through collecting material culture. Delbourgo points out that much of Sloane’s collection, now dispersed across several institutions, is unused and unexamined. The original descriptions, written through a colonial lens, are extant and we can no longer collect other contemporaneous accounts. It’s a reminder to be reflective about present-day practices and prejudices.
Delbourgo’s style is easy to read, though in his eagerness to pack the book with detail it is rather uneven. The chapters on processes of collecting are over-long and meandering. The weakest chapter is the last, on the development of the British Museum. Here Delbourgo falters and appears uncritical and unable to bring current thought and debate in museology to his account. A significant omission from the book is women. We hear almost nothing about Elizabeth, Sloane’s wife, apart from her money, and his daughters get a mere mention. A few female collectors get a couple of pages between them, but otherwise women are absent.
Nonetheless, Collecting the World is an important read. It shows why the glib responses to museums’ colonial origins are unacceptable, and it should make us reflect on the continued deification of Sloane and other colonial collectors. It is essential reading for all in museums, particularly directors and trustees.
Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane by James Delbourgo. Published by Allen Lane, 2017.
This article first appeared in Museums Journal in winter 2017.
Rachel Souhami 
One reply on “Collecting the World”
[…] plantations his wife had inherited” (p16), rather than his active complicity as outlined in James Delbourgo’s biography. Similarly, in the nineteenth century artefacts “arrive” because museums are “institutions of […]
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