39. Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum with James Delbourgo Museum Archipelago

Over the course of his long life, Hans Sloane collected tens of thousands of items which became the basis for what is today the British Museum. Funded in large part by his marriage into the enslaving plantocracy of Jamaica and the Atlantic slave trade, and aided by Britain’s rising colonial power and global reach, he assembled an encyclopedic collection of specimens and objects from all around the world.
James Delbourgo, professor of History of Science and Atlantic World at Rutgers University, is the author of Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. In this episode, Delbourgo describes Sloane’s formative years in Jamaica, how his collection was an attempt to catalogue the wonders and intricacies of a divine creation, and how the British Museum, which opened in 1759, came into being as a result of the terms Sloane laid down in his will. Delbourgo also discusses how Sloane’s idea of universal public access to his collections remains radical to this day.
Guest:
James Delbourgo
Book:
Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum
Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:15: James Delbourgo
00:40: Hans Sloane
02:10: Sloane in Jamaica
02:58: Earliest Transcription of African Music in the Americas
04:21: Sloane in London
06:58: Universal Public Access at the British Museum
10:40: Admission Charges at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
11:27: Recommendation: Museums in Strange Places
12:00: Outro


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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 39. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.




View Transcript




Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago is your audio guide through the landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.



James Delbourgo: My name is James Delbourgo. I am a professor of history of science and the Atlantic world at Rutgers and I'm the author of a recent book, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. It's a book that tells the story of Hans Sloane and how the British Museum came into existence in the 1750s.



Hans Sloane was born in the north of Ireland in 1660, and he moved to London at the age of 19. He trained as a botanist and as a physician.



James Delbourgo: But in 1687, he becomes physician to the new governor of Jamaica, the Duke of Albemarle, and he set sail with Albemarle really for two reasons. Of course, this is in part fortune seeking and Sloane hopes to become wealthy by sailing to Jamaica, which is just at this time becoming intensively converted to slave labor and sugar cultivation. Sloane goes to Jamaica really when Jamaica is beginning its rises through sugar and slavery, what will become one of the most lucrative colonies of the British Empire in the 18th century. So he has material incentives, but also botanical incentives and medical incentives, hoping to find new drugs that Europeans don't yet know about and also hoping to collect, record, note down information about as many new