The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

This chapter explores the major auction landscapes before 1914 and also describes the defining elements of the fin-de-siècle European market: integration, free trade, and cosmopolitanism. Examining societies’ approaches to artwork acquisition unveils contradictions and frictions within a milieu united by an international collecting class. France contended with an international, yet conservative, nationalist art world, while Germany’s bourgeoisie tried to control the world of luxury and consumption. In contrast, Britain grappled with questions about free trade and the preservation of art that challenged its laissez-faire tradition. It is precisely these tensions, which directly reflect the challenges posed by the commercialisation of art, that provide a framework for analysing the impact of the war. By emphasising the shared features of an integrated trade sphere, this chapter paints a balanced portrayal of a European market, where art mirrored the complex integration of both socioeconomic and cultural frameworks.

This chapter describes the wider political and economic changes that enabled foreigners, and particularly the British, to increasingly access and engage with the existing world of collecting, education and the sciences on the subcontinent. The result would be a slowing of the growth of resources in Indian centers such as Seringapatam and an acceleration of the growth of individual European-owned collections. The chapter begins by exploring changes in the patterns of accumulation that accompanied the conquest of Bengal. Here, I focus on the early careers of several Company servants who would eventually bring significant collections to Britain: Robert Orme, Alexander Dalrymple and Charles Wilkins. Each of these individuals would play an important role in the establishment of Company science back in Britain. And each, in their modes and methods of acquiring collections of knowledge resources from Asia, illustrate the debt that the growth of British resources would owe, in this period, to two major factors: wartime conventions of looting and plundering, and (in consequence of the wartime upheaval) deepening social and political interaction between foreigners and local scholars and educators. While foreigners in India had always collected, both wartime plundering and the Company’s new position relative to the Mughal Empire would open up many new avenues of access for Britons intent on acquiring manuscripts, curiosities and other knowledge resources. But the large collections that were beginning to be brought back to London would remain, for now, part of the private trade, destined for personal collections or sale by individuals. The final section of this chapter follows the Company’s first steps toward moving from contracted-out to Company-owned science, which began with institutional changes on the subcontinent in the wake of the major land reforms in the 1790s.

Contrary to some accounts, particularly older ones, which portray Clare as a lonely, isolated, and somewhat misanthropic figure, he was a man with a rich social life who had many friends, including literary figures, antiquarians, ornithologists, entomologists, botanists, and artists. Through these friendships, he was abreast of contemporary thought and techniques, and, if only at second hand, he was in touch with the activities of some of the leading naturalists in this country and abroad. This obviously led to an increased knowledge and sophistication in Clare’s understanding of nature, as well as leading to subtle changes in his attitude to the natural world. In particular, it meant that he no longer regarded a love of nature as something to be rather ashamed of, but instead as something which he was able to celebrate.

Collecting and collector culture remain important aspects in the contemporary graphic novel, sustaining a relationship to the past that is tangible in material objects. While the representation of collectors is well known, this chapter charts a somewhat different aspect of collectors and the archives they assemble: it is less interested in graphic novelists as collectors than in their indebtedness to previous collections and the new uses they invent for them. This chapter attends to an earlier moment in the history of comics, one that precisely framed collecting as part of a media-historical conversation and in a context of changing ideas about cultural value, preservation, reproduction, and access, studying its long-term implications for understanding the archival impulse in the graphic novel today.

Chapter 5 investigates the political uses of antiquity during wartime. It argues that the War of the Morea was a turning point in the reception of classical tradition that enacted the imperial topos of translatio imperii et studii. The mastery of Greek territories was also a mastery of archaeological sites and artifacts that renewed the culture of antiquity in Venice. The chapter shows that patrician collecting and the public display of antiquities as war trophies were inseparable from an aggressive military antiquarianism that supported the Republic’s new imperial regime with intellectual and cultural power from ancient Greece. Specifically, the occupation of Athens, with its famous history and symbolic potency, inspired strong associations between Venetian maritime supremacy and the fifth-century Athenian empire. But it also launched a new phase in the European rediscovery of Greek art and architecture through one of the darkest episodes of Venetian history: the bombardment and despoliation of the Parthenon.

This chapter argues that sites of punitive relocation were important locations for colonial encounters, exploration, and knowledge formation. Their relatively open character meant that many convicts lived and settled in already dynamic societies in which Indigenous peoples, settlers, labour migrants, and/ or enslaved persons lived. Thus, they constituted ideal vantage points for the observation of Indigenous peoples, and for commodity exchange. Central points here are that Indigenous people greatly assisted the process of penal colonization that at the same time dispossessed and devastated them, and they encountered and resisted the people who came to live in sites of penal relocation in a variety of ways. From a history of science perspective, it is also significant that the separate penal colonies established in nations and empires from the late eighteenth century onwards were often located in relatively pristine natural spaces. Penal administrators and visiting naturalists, botanists, geologists, and zoologists exploited these natural resources in their scientific research – often assisted by convicts and Indigenous peoples. Convicts and colonized populations played a vital role in Europe’s so-called voyages of discovery, with scientists drawing on their superior local knowledge and practical support.

Over the last 30 years, information in the form of digital data has become the foundation upon which decisions are made. Governments, businesses and organisations have realised that they must have access to the right data at the right time, and also undertake differing types of analysis to make correct decisions. Data have become a part of everyday life, and the ability for all citizens to have some level of data literacy is becoming increasingly important. Data literacy in schools, or the ability to understand and use data effectively to inform decisions, will create transferable skills for students moving into the twenty-first century workforce. This means students need to be highly skilled in collecting, recording, accessing and representing data. Students should know where and how to access data, and how to use data to tell their story. Geography plays an essential role in developing these skills in the school curriculum, particularly in the secondary years. While ‘using data’ is a skill in many subjects, geography provides the opportunity for data to be used in real-world contexts, and the skills are very transferable for many future pathways.

The Introduction presents the central questions and motivations of the book: why do Greek lists exist in such abundance, what are their purposes, and how do we trace their trajectory through and across the genres and text-types of the late archaic and Classical periods? How do literary and documentary texts intersect in this tradition? How, finally, does this widespread cultural phenomenon inform the post-Classical inventories and archival traditions we see in such abundance? As a grounding and point of departure, it provides a brief survey of lists and their manifestations in Greek literature and inscriptions. It turns then to definitions of lists, precursors to Greek alphabetic lists, and theoretical preliminaries, including: the connections of lists and literacy, orality, and numeracy, and lists’ relationship to memory, narrative, counting, and collecting.Finally, the Introduction establishes an original framework for the functions of Greek lists, to be explored and examined in the main body chapters of the book: Greek lists, I propose, serve to perform a spectrum of actions upon objects: they collect, count, control, display, distort, memorialize, and, finally, conjure them.

The complex mix of transgression and conservativism in the sexual politics of Decadence is well explored through the Decadent turn back to the ancient world. Looking back to antiquity at the end of the nineteenth century was an complex aesthetic performance, reflecting both genuflection to traditional cultural authority and transgression of modern political frameworks. The Decadent imagination was interested in the aesthetics of collecting. Decadent writers became fascinated by androgynous and hermaphroditic bodily forms, which they viewed as a symbol of decadent collecting culture – an assemblage of pleasurable, sensuous experiences. But the ambiguously gendered body of ancient art, so venerated by Decadent writers, revealed the ambivalences of their gender politics.

The conclusion reviews the principle arguments of the book as part of a coda which reflects on how and why the post-revolutionary culture of collecting was redefined in the final decade of the nineteenth century. A combination of new intellectual paradigms, changes in museum funding and the growing weight of the transatlantic market undercut private collectors’ claims to be stewards of French heritage. Yet amidst these changes the conclusion stresses continuities in how the amateur was conceived in tension with the bureaucratic state, and a study of major donations at the close of the nineteenth century- such as that of Eugène Piot- underlines the persistence of aristocratic forms of distinction within the support given to republican institutions. Challenging conventional narratives about the birth of a uniform national heritage, the book concludes by arguing for the resilience of private patrimony outside of state control.

Chapter 1 traces the transformation of the art market across the revolutionary era, drawing on recent scholarship to consider how the French Revolution changed the availability of artworks and the cultural meanings attached to their preservation. These processes are observed through the writings of Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain, whose manuscripts and publications documented the demise of the old regime of curiosity he knew in his youth. The introduction argues that the eclipse of corporate institutions and the attack on the privileged orders changed the meaning of collecting by opening the title of amateur to much wider social constituency whilst nonetheless retaining the idea that the correct exercise of taste was even more important in the disorderly new circumstances. The chapter traces the emergence of dealers in art and curiosities across post-revolutionary Paris and argues that the revamped category of the amateur was simultaneously dependent upon but hostile to these new commercial forces.

This chapter describes the role of private individuals who aimed to collect the traces of the French Revolution amidst the tumultuous events. It is centred on the figure of Jean-Louis Soulavie, and his unique collection of prints and drawings, now split between the Louvre and regional archives. It discusses how Soulavie acquired and interpreted this corpus of images, drawing connections with his changing political convictions, and the different functions ascribed to the image, including the commemorative (especially for victims of the Terror), the explanatory (seeking to understand the cause-and-effect of revolutionary processes) and the predictive (echoing Soulavie’s belief in the occult power of images). It connects Soulavie’s engagement with visual culture with other aspects of his collecting and considers the dispersal of many cabinets assembled by this first generation of collector-historians during the Restoration.

This chapter is centred on what was widely seen as the sale of the nineteenth century- the 1893 dispersal of the Spitzer collections. Austrian-born Frédéric Spitzer in many ways was the inheritor of the salvage crusade begun in earlier generations, building up a brilliant array of medieval and Renaissance artefacts (including some faked and composite pieces created on his commission). This chapter explores the visibility of Spitzer in French print culture in order to interrogate the claims for private collectors as patriots, and the attempt by the Third Republic to make collectors into auxiliaries of national policy. The scandal surrounding his sale exposes the anxieties about the interplay of private interest and public institutions, the sensitivity about curators like Émile Molinier when they operated in the market, as well as the virulence of anti-Semitic hostility to Jewish dealers. Most pervasive was the wider fear that French heritage was increasingly snapped up and repatriated by foreign buyers, so that the 1893 sale could be alternately depicted as a triumph, a swindle or a defeat for French culture.

The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune 1870-71 exercised a dramatic impact on the rhetoric around private collecting, this chapter suggests. It examines why conservative collectors such as baron Jérôme Pichon felt that they were personally under attack as the city was shelled and burned during the année terrible, and suggests that heritage became intensely politicised, as radicals were blamed for repeating the vandalism previously seen in the Revolution of 1789. The chapter emphasis the emergence of a belligerent branch of art history written by Pichon’s associations- like Louis Courajod and baron Charles Davillier- and stresses that conservative collectors took their vision of the past into the public sphere through the vibrant culture of temporary exhibitions which emerged under the Second Empire. Through the figure of baron Léopold Double, it explores the cult of the old regime created by royalists but also argues that this cult proved very unstable in the new political and economic circumstances of the 1880s.