The British Museum

<p>A concise history of one of the world's greatest and most comprehensive museum collections, from its founding in 1753.<br><br>A product and symbol of the 18th-century Enlightenment, the British Museum is as iconic an expression of that cultural tendency as Johnson's <i>Dictionary</i>, the French <i>Encyclopedie</i> and Linnaean plant classification. Its collections embody the raw material of empiricism – the bringing together of things to enable the widest intellectual experiment to take place. <br><br>James Hamilton explores the establishment of the Museum in the 1750s (from the bequest to the nation of the collections of Sir Hans Sloane); the chosen site of its location; the cultural context in which it came into being; the subsequent development, expansion and diversification of the Museum, both as a collection and as a building, from the early 19th to the 21st century; the controversy occasioned by some of its acquisitions; and the legacy and influence of the Museum nationally and globally.</p>