This chapter follows the creation and early growth of Company science in London. The Company first began taking a direct stake in education and the sciences with the establishment of botanical gardens, medical training colleges and other institutions in British India. But around the turn of the century, the foundation of the new library-museum and colleges in Britain would sharply redirect the growth of new Company-run initiatives for science and education back to Britain. That shift toward a new, London-centered set of institutions and priorities related to knowledge management took full advantage of the Company’s legal monopoly on access to Asia’s knowledge resources. And it would begin with the stepwise incorporation into the administration at India House of the work of the orientalists, naturalists, collectors covered in the previous chapters. The London careers of a set of nabob-scholars – Robert Orme, Alexander Dalrymple and Charles Wilkins from Chapter 2, as well as William Marsden – illustrate how the early beginnings of Company science in London flourished at the porous boundary between individual and corporate ownership.

This chapter examines the motivations for and practices of library formation, development and management exercised by the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS), Britain’s oldest provincial learned society and second oldest museum. It contends that civic philanthropy in the form of library formation served as a core activity for SGS members throughout the first fifty years of the Society’s history, and as a key component of the society’s raison d’être. The SGS’s extensive archival and bibliographical holdings provide a means of examining the modes of acquisition, cataloguing and circulation of the three libraries under the SGS’s management in the period 1710–1755: the parish library of St Mary and St Nicolas, the library of Spalding Grammar School, and the library housed in the SGS museum. Spalding’s libraries provide a composite case study that reveals the interconnection of individual and institutional forms of philanthropy at work in eighteenth-century libraries. At the same time, the SGS emerges as a precursor of the later eighteenth-century subscription libraries and literary and philosophical societies that engaged in library formation as a means of fostering sociability, education, improvement and intellectual exchange in local communities throughout Britain.