Joseph Banks and the British Museum:

The World of Collecting 1770–1830

Neil Chambers

Hb: 210pp: 2007
978 1 85196 858 9: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00

978 1 85196 535 9

There has been an upsurge of interest in the British Museum’s unrivalled collections and their place in eighteenth-century culture. Concentrating on the explorer and naturalist Joseph Banks (1743–1820), this book explores the early history of collections at the British Museum, the first public national museum to be established. Banks travelled around the world with James Cook on HMS Endeavour, making important plant, animal and insect collections. Becoming one of the major patrons of British exploration and science, Banks was a significant trustee and donor of material for the museum.

Chambers examines the ways different eighteenth-century collections (including Banks’s own) were managed, and how the British Museum and collecting more generally grew and changed in this important period of travel, exploration and empire.

Sample pages

Joseph Banks and the British Musem: Introduction

Readership

Eighteenth-Century Studies, History of Travel and Exploration, History of Collecting and Curating, Empire Studies

Introduction
1 Banks as an Early Traveller and Collector, and the British Museum
2 Ethnography
3 Natural History and Zoology
4 Investigating Natural History: Gradually Expanding Limits After 1800
5 Earth Sciences
6 Libraries and Antiquities
Conclusion

Reviews

'A tantalizing taster to the wealth of information that we can expect from The Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks; together these publications will shape how historians, biographers and other scholars will interpret Banks’s contribution to the world of science.'
– Andrea Wulf, Notes and Records of the Royal Society

'scrupulously researched and referenced'
– David Hibberd, Archives of Natural History