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. Rather than focusing on a specific scientific field or single national context, this collection captures the multiplicity of practices, people, languages, and agendas that characterized the traffic in knowledge around the Atlantic world, linking this knowledge to the social processes fundamental to colonialism, such as travel, trade, ethnography, and slavery.

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. Rather than focusing on a specific scientific field or single national context, this collection captures the multiplicity of practices, people, languages, and agendas that characterized the traffic in knowledge around the Atlantic world, linking this knowledge to the social processes fundamental to colonialism, such as travel, trade, ethnography, and slavery.

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

Hans Sloane 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, 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. 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. He became one of the eighteenth century's preeminent natural historians and assembled an astonishing collection of specimens, artefacts and oddities - the most famous curiosity cabinet of the age. 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. 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 empire and slavery but which nonetheless produced one of the great public institutions of the Enlightenment, as the cabinet of curiosities gave way to the encyclopaedic museum. Collecting the World describes this pivotal moment in the emergence of modern knowledge, and brings this totemic figure back to life.

Benjamin Franklin's invention of the lightning rod is the founding fable of American science, but Franklin was only one of many early Americans fascinated by electricity. 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, Delbourgobrilliantly illuminates a revolutionary New World of wonder.