This chapter offers a brief biography of Sloane, beginning with a reflection on his currently unstable position within the institutions he helped found due to his investment in the transatlantic slave trade. The chapter explores his contemporary reception as a learned man of science who held an important role in the Royal Society of London as secretary, as well as the satirical portrayals of Sloane as a undiscerning omnivore. The chapter offers close literary attention to William King’s pamphlet The Transactioneer. It then moves on to give a history and overview of Sloane’s collecting habits, including an overview of their scope, and finally offers a detailed analysis of the two main tools used to navigate the project: Sloane’s own catalogues and the British Library’s digital reconstruction of his collections.

Some fifty years after Francis Bacon had urged the study of the history of learning (historia literaria) in the early seventeenth century, this new discipline began to be developed in the Hamburg region. One of its main proponents was Daniel Georg Morhof, Major’s colleague at the University of Kiel. Major himself engaged in this study in many ways. The history of learning offered a platform for scholars to review the institutions, media, and genres of global knowledge from the dawn of time. Scholars studied how varying knowledge practices related to knowledge’s advance or decline. The premise of this study was that current scholarly practices in Europe were flawed and could be improved through attention to global epistemologies and practices. These views infused Major’s approaches, as in his attention to prehistoric knowledge or his study of global curating practices as the basis for a new approach to the museum. As this chapter explores, he also participated in the critical review and reform of knowledge infrastructures including dissertations, journal publications, critical commentary, citation practices, cataloging, note-taking, and ways of connecting disciplines together.