{"title":"James Delbourgo","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"collecting-the-world-book-james-delbourgo-9780674237483","title":"Collecting the World","description":"Winner of the Leo Gershoy Award Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize A Times Book of the Week A Guardian Book of the Week  “A wonderfully intelligent book.” —Linda Colley  “A superb biography—humane, judicious and as passionately curious as Sloane himself.” —Times Literary Supplement  When the British Museum opened its doors in 1759, it was the first free national public museum in the world. Collecting the World tells the story of the eccentric collector whose thirst for universal knowledge brought it into being.  A man of insatiable curiosity and wide-ranging interests, Hans Sloane assembled a collection of antiquities, oddities, and artifacts from around the British Empire. It became the most famous cabinet of curiosities of its time. With few curbs on his passion, he established a network of agents to supply him with objects from China, India, the Caribbean, and beyond. Wampum beads, rare manuscripts, a shoe made of human skin: nothing was off limits, regardless of its human cost. The first biography of Sloane based on his complete writings, Collecting the World portrays one of the Enlightenment’s most original and controversial luminaries.  “Engrossing…situates Sloane within the welter of intellectual and political crosscurrents that marked his times.” —New York Times Book Review  “A magnificent scholarly coup and an enthralling read… It conveys the excitement of original research as well as the thrill of tracking exotic curiosities to their source.” —Sunday Times  “This book is a fitting tribute to [Sloane’s] contradiction-riven life. Collecting the World is about the torment of slavery, and it’s about buttered muffins and about snakes shot on boats. It teaches us about how we know, how we organize and discipline our knowledge.” —New Republic","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49519365030161,"sku":"GOR013723258","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51819088576785,"sku":"NIN9780674237483","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51903024791825,"sku":"GOR010355261","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52610861760785,"sku":"CIN067423748XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/067423748X.jpg?v=1750977157"},{"product_id":"collecting-the-world-book-james-delbourgo-9781846146572","title":"Collecting the World","description":"'Nothing so fully displays the grandeur of his mind as his immense and rare collections ... perhaps the fullest and most curious in the world', National Gazette, 1753   Hans Sloane (1660-1753) 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 squares named after him on land he once owned (Sloane Square, Hans Place), but the man himself, and his achievements, are almost forgotten.   Born in the north of Ireland, Sloane made his fortune as a physician to London's wealthiest residents and through investment in land and slavery. He became one of the eighteenth century's preeminent natural historians, ultimately succeeding his rival Isaac Newton as President of the Royal Society, and assembled an astonishing collection of specimens, artefacts and oddities - the most famous curiosity cabinet of the age.   Sloane's dream of universal knowledge, of a gathering together of every kind of thing in the world, was enabled by Britain's rise to global ascendancy. In 1687 he travelled to Jamaica, then at the heart of Britain's commercial empire, to survey its natural history, and later organised a network of correspondents who sent him curiosities from across the world. Shortly after his 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 museum, the British Museum, which opened in 1759.  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 imperial enterprise and slavery but which nonetheless gave rise to one of the great public institutions of the Enlightenment, as the cabinet of curiosities gave way to the encyclopaedic museum. 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As a dramatically new physical experience, electricity amazed those who dared to tame the lightning and set it coursing through their own bodies. Thanks to its technological and medical utility, but also its surprising ability to defy rational experimental mastery, electricity was a powerful experience of enlightenment, at once social, intellectual, and spiritual.  In this compelling book, James Delbourgo moves beyond Franklin to trace the path of electricity through early American culture, exploring how the relationship between human, natural, and divine powers was understood in the eighteenth century. By examining the lives and visions of natural philosophers, spectacular showmen, religious preachers, and medical therapists, he shows how electrical experiences of wonder, terror, and awe were connected to a broad array of cultural concerns that defined the American Enlightenment. The history of lightning rods, electrical demonstrations, electric eels, and medical electricity reveals how early American science, medicine, and technology were shaped by a culture of commercial performance, evangelical religion, and republican politics from mid-century to the early republic.  The first book to situate early American experimental science in the context of a transatlantic public sphere, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders offers a captivating view of the origins of American science and the cultural meaning of the American Enlightenment. In a story of shocks and sparks from New England to the Caribbean, Delbourgo brilliantly illuminates a revolutionary New World of wonder.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49653554610449,"sku":"GOR013161591","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51325355360529,"sku":"CIN0674022998G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51461403246865,"sku":"CIN0674022998VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0674022998.jpg?v=1751167749"},{"product_id":"science-and-empire-in-the-atlantic-world-book-james-delbourgo-9780415961271","title":"Science and Empire in the Atlantic World","description":"Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book in the growing field of Atlantic Studies to examine the production of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world from a comparative and international perspective. 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From looters and idolaters to fin de siècle decadents and Freudian psychos, A Noble Madness is a captivating history of obsessive collectors from ancient times to today.   From Roman emperors lusting after statues to modern-day hoarders, award-winning author James Delbourgo tells the extraordinary story of fanatical collectors throughout history. He explains how the idea first emerged that when we look at someone’s collection, we see a portrait of their soul: complex, intriguing, yet possibly insane. What Delbourgo calls “the Romantic collecting self” has always lurked on the dark side of humanity.   But this dark side has a silver lining. Because obsessive collectors are driven by passion, not profit, they have been countercultural heroes in the modern imagination, defying respectability and taste in the name of truth to self.   A grand portrait gallery of collectors in all their decadent glory, A Noble Madness recounts the saga of the human urge to accumulate, from Caligula to Marie Antoinette, Balzac to Freud, Norman Bates to Andy Warhol. Collectors’ love of objects may be mad, even dangerous. 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I loved this book' Edmund de Waal 'Magnificent . . . so compulsive and entertaining' Stephen Fry 'Give it to the collector in your life, and watch sparks fly!' Cathy Gere 'A delight to read and ponder' Jackson Lears 'A tour de force of scholarship and storytelling' Daniel Weiss  A captivating history of obsessive collectors: from ancient looters and idolaters to fin de siècle decadents, Freudian psychos, and hoarders.  Collectors are often praised for their taste in art or contributions to science, but there can be a darker side: their passion is sometimes driven by dangerous obsession. Roman emperors who lusted after statues; Chinese scholars obsessed with rocks and flowers; fin de siècle dandies surrounded by bibelots. History is full of stories about those who love things more than people, presenting a danger either to themselves or others.   In this sweeping history from antiquity to today, James Delbourgo tells the extraordinary story of the mad collector as a cultural figure from the tyrant and idolater to the sexually repressed \"psycho\" of the Freudian imagination and the modern-day hoarder. His conclusion is surprising: Because they are driven by passion rather than profit, obsessive collectors also have been cultural heroes, seen as authentic and true to themselves. Some may be mad, but theirs is a noble madness.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53099705467153,"sku":"NGR9781529424034","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781529424034.jpg?v=1777543633"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-james-delbourgo.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}