This book was made possible in large part by generous support from the Canadian and American public university systems. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC); the Department of History and Faculty of Arts at McGill University; and the Department of History, School of Arts and Sciences, Research Council, Center for Cultural Analysis and Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers – the State University of New Jersey. Additional support was provided by the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge; the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; the British Academy; the American Philosophical Society; the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; and the Department of History of Science at Harvard University.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the large cast of characters and celebrate the friendships that helped me realize a complex project. My deepest thanks go to my mentor and friend the incomparable Simon Schaffer. Simon has provided the greatest inspiration and warmest encouragement for this book, with both biting humour and true kindness, from start to finish. My admiration and affection for him know no bounds. Several fellow travellers deserve special recognition too for camaraderie of the highest order: Martha Fleming, Mirjam Brusius, Justin Erik Halldór Smith, John Tresch, Toby Jones, Lissa Roberts, Nicholas Dew and Neil Safier. For friendship and support over many years, I also warmly thank Cyrus Schayegh, Erik Goldner, Nuha Ansari, Viken Berberian, Ninon Vinsonneau, Jonathan Magidoff, Adina Ruiu, Cornelius Borck, Susanne Timm, Daniel Carey, Julie Kim, Miles Ogborn, Sanjay Krishnan, Lynn Festa, Henry Turner, Sharon Jordan and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson. For mentorship and counsel over the long haul, I am especially grateful to my former adviser David Armitage, who has as ever been prodigious in his generosity and vigorous in his support, as well as Steven Shapin, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Richard Drayton. Ann Fabian has been both a mentor and a model who has championed and inspired me in numerous brilliant ways.
For taking the time to offer detailed comments on entire drafts of the manuscript, I thank Cathy Gere, Linda Colley, Miles Ogborn, Simon Schaffer, Laura Kopp, Chris Blakley, Katy Barrett, Ben Sinyor (who made expert recommendations of many kinds) and my marvellous copy-editor Peter James; Stephen Ryan and Richard Mason for their astounding proofreading; and, for advice on specific chapters, Daniel Carey, Lucia Dacome, Arnold Hunt, Julie Kim, Nicholas Dew and Anna Winterbottom. In Montréal, where I began this project over a decade ago, I am grateful to my friends and colleagues Jonathan Sterne, Carrie Rentschler, Laila Parsons, François Furstenberg, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, Elizabeth Elbourne, Kate Desbarats, Faith Wallis, Brian Cowan, Brian Lewis and John Hall. At Rutgers, Michael Adas, Tuna Artun, Alastair Bellany, Marisa Fuentes, Jochen Hellbeck, Paul Israel, Jennifer Jones, Seth Koven, Jackson Lears, Julie Livingston, Jim Masschaele, Michael McKeon, Donna Murch and Johanna Schoen have supported me with conversation, counsel and encouragement of every kind. I acknowledge generous assistance from Mark Wasserman and Barbara Cooper as Chairs of the History Department and Jimmy Swenson as Dean of Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences, and brilliant logistical aid from our staff led by Candace Walcott-Shepherd and including Mary Demeo, Matt Leonaggeo and Tiffany Berg.
For many miscellaneous kindnesses, my thanks go to Elena Aronova, Toby Barnard, Kenneth Bilby, A. J. Blandford, Daniela Bleichmar, Janet Browne, Hugh Cagle, Joyce Chaplin, Wendy Churchill, Hal Cook, Patricia Crone, Laurent Dubois, Richard Duguid, Adrienne Duperly, Elizabeth Eger, James Elwick, Patricia Fara, Joel Fry, Donald Futers, Travis Glasson, Anne Goldgar, Anne Harrington, Anke te Heesen, Florence Hsia, Dominik Huenniger, Michael Hunter, Annabel Huxley, Margaret Jacob, Lisa Jardine, Michael Keevak, Sachiko Kusukawa, Rebecca Lemov, Dániel Margócsy, Alice Marples, Yair Mintzker, Sina Najafi, R. Neville, Maia Nuku, Tara Nummedal, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Victoria Pickering, Juan Pimentel, Isola di Ponza, Nick Radburn, Richard Rath, François Regourd, Felicity Roberts, James Robertson, Anna Marie Roos, Alessandra Russo, Efram Sera-Shriar, Suman Seth, Sujit Sivasundaram, Lisa Smith, Emma Spary, Richard Spiegel, Cameron Strang, Claudia Swan, Stéphane Van Damme, Simon Werrett and Chris Wingfield.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to the curators of Sloane’s London collections, who warmly shared their expertise and welcomed me into their places of work, and with whom I collaborated on the ‘Reconstructing Sloane’ research project. Two people stand out for playing vital roles in my research: Martha Fleming, who walked with me down many a museum corridor as matchless translator and guide; and Kim Sloan, Francis Finlay Curator of the Enlightenment Gallery and Curator of British Drawings and Watercolours before 1880 at the British Museum, whose guidance, intelligence and grace helped keep me sane, at least in part. Thanks also go to Arthur MacGregor, formerly Director of the Ashmolean Museum, and Marjorie Caygill, formerly of the British Museum; Charlie Jarvis, who guided me with good humour through the wonders of the Sloane Herbarium at the Natural History Museum; Jonathan King, who first introduced me to Sloane’s collections at the British Museum; and Arnold Hunt and Alison Walker at the British Library. I also acknowledge kind assistance from Julie Harvey, Ranee Prakash, Mark Spencer, Rob Huxley, Kathie Way, Mandy Holloway, Roy Vickery, Dave Goodger, Peter Tandy, John Hunnexe, Tracy-Ann Smith and Katherine Hann at the Natural History Museum; Venetia Porter, J. D. Hill and Stephanie Clarke at the British Museum; Peter Barber and Stephen Parkin at the British Library; Felicity Henderson and Keith Moore at the Royal Society; Dee Cook at Apothecaries’ Hall; Rosie Atkins at Chelsea Physic Garden; and Alex Werner at the Museum of London. Ted Widmer and Susan Danforth generously hosted my exhibition ‘Voyage to the Islands: Sloane, Slavery and Scientific Travel in the Caribbean’ at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence in 2012.
For invitations to present my research and receive crucial feedback, I thank Ken Alder (Northwestern University), Rosie Atkins (Chelsea Physic Garden), Ulrike Beisiegel and Marie Luisa Allemeyer (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen), Catherine Brice and Konstantina Zanou (Université de Paris), Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh (Victoria and Albert Museum), Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (University of Texas – Austin), Alex Csiszar and Anne Harrington (Harvard History of Science), Samaa Elimam (Harvard School of Design), Ian Foster (Frenchman’s Cove, Jamaica), Erik Goldner (California State University – Northridge), Jan Golinski (University of New Hampshire), Pablo Gómez (University of Wisconsin – Madison), Fredrik Jonsson (University of Chicago), Jonathan King (British Museum), Karen Kupperman (NYU), Gesa Mackenthun and Andrea Zittlau (Universität Rostock), María-Elena Martínez and Deborah Harkness (University of Southern California), Peter Miller (Bard Graduate Center), Phil Morgan (Johns Hopkins), Staffan Müller-Wille (Max Planck Institute, Berlin), Kärin Nickelsen and Fabian Krämer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), Miles Ogborn and Valentina Pugliano (University of London), Giuliano Pancaldi (Università di Bologna), Dahlia Porter and Kelly Wisecup (University of North Texas), Greg Radick and Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds), Roy Ritchie (Huntington Library), Neil Safier (University of British Columbia), Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge), Londa Schiebinger (Stanford), John Tresch and Michael Zuckerman (University of Pennsylvania), Alison Walker (British Library) and Ted Widmer (John Carter Brown Library). For hosting me during research fellowships, I am grateful to Mary Jacobus and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge), Jonathan Israel (Princeton) and Lorraine Daston (Berlin).
My dear friend Kristen Friedman has played a pivotal role throughout: she was the only research assistant for the entire project, dating back to our time in Montréal, where she unearthed endless leads about Sloane long before I knew what to do with them. My agent Jennifer Lyons has been an unstinting source of support and friendship, while working with Steph Ebdon, Susie Nicklin and the Marsh Agency has been a pleasure, as has reuniting with Kathleen McDermott at Harvard, whom I thank for her excellent work on the North American edition. My editor Stuart Proffitt made many valuable suggestions regarding the book as a whole and improved it very significantly as a result. Jennifer van der Grinten did excellent work on the bibliography and index. Better late than never, I salute George Paxton, my English teacher at school in Reigate, who always encouraged me to keep writing. Quoting a line from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he once instructed us to go home, turn out the light in our bedroom and, when our parents came in to investigate, to respond ‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death’ – and gauge their reaction.
Finally, I would be nothing without my beloved family, who have always looked out for me with love and guidance. I thank my sister Elizabeth Fleure and brother Richard, who cared for me like parents as much as siblings, and my brother David, who remains much missed but still very present. So too do my father Raphael Jack Delbourgo, who was born in the port city of Aden in Yemen and lived in Addis Ababa but spent his later years in Harrington Gardens in Kensington; and my brother-in-law Philip Fleure, whose parents were Jamaican, and who married and made a home with my sister on Old Jamaica Road in Bermondsey. I warmly acknowledge my sister-in-law Helen Cadwallader Delbourgo and my father-in-law the artist Dieter Kopp in Rome. Most of all I thank my mother and my wife, to whom this book is dedicated. Rosella Maria Properzi grew up in Ancona and Porto San Giorgio (Le Marche) before moving to Rome and Addis Ababa and settling in London with my father, where she raised a family. She took me travelling and showed me the world when I was young and I owe my life to her enormous spirit and infinite devotion. My boon companion Laura Kopp has advised me with genius and kindness on every imaginable aspect of this book during our travels from Montréal to New York to London, Rome, Berlin and Jamaica. She makes all good things possible.
New York, March 2017