The very existence and shape of the British Museum played a critical role, argues Robert Anderson in his introductory essay, in organizing the epistemological framework within which artifacts, natural or artificial, were defined. A similar argument could be made for the scholarly categorization of eighteenth-century British collecting within the confines of the volume under review. In this study of the contexts—public, private, social, scientific, artistic, and European—within which collecting was situated in eighteenth-century Britain, a relief image of the British Museum can begin to be discerned.

The work presents the combined papers of the eponymous conference at the British Museum in 2002. The twenty-two papers and summation by Keith Thomas are not intended as a history of the British Museum, or a belaboring of the museum's genealogy, but rather present a survey of the intellectual context in which the museum originated and developed over the course of the eighteenth century. As such, the collection is wide-ranging, offering the reader the fair possibility of attaining—at least so far as the subject of the early context of the museum is concerned—what Thomas in his summation describes as the “polymathic ideal: the notion that any one individual could and should attempt to grasp the whole of human knowledge” (185).

Sir Hans Sloane must of necessity loom large in any study of the museum in early modern Britain, and he is by no means neglected within the collection. Debora Meijers, in surveying the collection models with which Sloane would have been familiar, offers the wonderful glimpse of an elderly Sloane weighing the merits of Paris against St. Petersburg on the list of potential beneficiaries of his collection. Marjorie Caygill portrays the Sloane collection in action, as it were, describing the layout of Sloane's collection as it would have been encountered by visitors. Richard Yeo explores the analogies between different types of collecting, comparing the encyclopedic practices of Ephraim Chambers with the material and textual compilations of Sloane.

Of particular interest as well are the chapters on medical and natural historical collecting. Ken Arnold embarks on a much-needed exploration of medical collecting, examining the role of medical collections, physic gardens, and the materia medica in the practice of medicinal chemistry. Hugh Torrens, in a survey of the fortunes of natural history collections in eighteenth-century Britain, relates several harrowing anecdotes of the dispersal or auctioning of collections. The collection of Margaret Cavendish Harley, the third duchess of Portland, for instance, was auctioned off to pay creditors, in a sale that lasted some forty mornings—at least thirty-one of which, according to Horace Walpole, were devoted exclusively to the fossils, shells, eggs, and other familiar accoutrements of natural history (82). Neil Chambers examines the influence of Joseph Banks in shaping the distinction between the collecting of natural historical and ethnographic specimens. In one instance, Chambers argues, Banks organized the respective focuses of natural history and ethnography by the simple expedient of sending natural historical specimens to Kew and ethnographic artifacts to the British Museum.

The remaining papers range over a rewardingly eclectic selection of subjects. Anderson offers an analysis of the utilitarian and decorative roles attached to scientific instruments in eighteenth-century collections—and, even more interestingly, in paintings of collections. Lisa Jardine traces the laborious birth, after Robert Hooke's death in 1703, of the Royal Society's Repository—the “Hookean Museum,” as she dubs it—in 1712 (49). Ian Jenkins provides a welcome sketch of the physician and antiquary, Richard Mead, and T. G. H. James charts the rising fortunes of Egyptology with Napoleon's expedition to Egypt.

The one weakness that could be attributed to the work echoes a criticism often leveled at many early modern antiquarians and natural historians, namely, that the work sacrifices, in depth of analysis, what it gains in breadth. The essays, taken together, offer a survey of British antiquarianism and natural history, in all its manifestations, from the early Ashmolean and Royal Society collections through the arrival, in Portsmouth, of the Rosetta Stone. There is an inevitable bias, as in the work of the eighteenth-century British virtuosi, toward the scientific aspects of early modern collecting and natural history. There is also a bias, again reflecting the tendencies of the work's subjects, toward the very particular, the instance rather than the whole. As a whole, however, the work will be of great use to the scholar of intellectual culture in eighteenth-century Britain. Enlightening the British marks a welcome addition to the still too-short shelf of works addressing the culture—social, intellectual, and practical—of collecting in the eighteenth century.