Collecting The World

Hans Sloane was the greatest collector of his time, and one of the greatest of all time. His name is familiar today through the London streets and squ ares named after him, but the man himself, and his achievements, are almost forgotten. Born in the north of Ireland, Sloane made his fortune as a physician to Lon don's wealthiest residents. In 1687 he travelled to Jamaica, then at the he art of Britain's commercial empire, to survey its natural history, and late r organised a network of correspondents who sent him curiosities from acros s the world. He became one of the eighteenth century's preeminent natural h istorians and assembled an astonishing collection of specimens, artefacts a nd oddities - the most famous curiosity cabinet of the age. Shortly after h is death, Sloane's vast collection was then acquired - as he had hoped - by the nation. It became the nucleus of the world's first national public mus eum, the British Museum. This is the first biography of Sloane in over sixty years and the first based on his surviving collections. Early modern science and collecting are shown to be global endeavours intertwined with empire and slavery but which nonetheless produced one of the great public institutions of the Enlightenment, as the cabinet of curiosities gave way to the encyclopaedic museum. Collecting the World describes this pivotal moment in the emergence of modern knowledge, and brings this totemic figure back to life.

Product Info

ISBN: 0718194438

ISBN-13: 9780718194437

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Year: 2018

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

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