‘Exceeding the Age in Every Thing’: Placing Sloane’s Objects

Abstract

That objects of knowledge get moved across boundaries is well known. But how they get moved often goes unexamined. Modes of movement cannot be ignored when considering objects’ historical signi?cance. Put differently, how geographies are negotiated is central to the constitution of knowledge objects. This essay offers a brief assessment of the competing agencies at work in the global collections of the Enlightenment naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). While discussing broadly the relationship between collecting and power in Sloane’s career, the essay stresses the passivity and strategic weakness of the collector, and suggests how the meanings of speci?c curiosities varied according to asymmetries in their mode of transfer.

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