Although (or perhaps because) I am still deeply immersed in writing about Macintosh’s experiences in the Caribbean during the 1770s, I cannot resist looking forward to the material that lies ahead. My recent visits to the British Library have allowed me to begin filling in the fascinating details of Macintosh’s counterrevolutionary activities in Switzerland and the levels of secrecy that were required in order to communicate transnationally during the French Revolution.

Alongside the use of sympathetic ink, Macintosh recommended in a memorandum to Charles Jenkinson, then President of the Board of Trade, that a common cypher (above) be used to facilitate safe communication and “to secure agents against surprise”. This period in Macintosh’s life—mysterious by design—is one that I am very much looking forward to tackling and untangling.

For a number of years I have been in discussion with a kind and encouraging editor at a university press over my planned book. His patience has been exceeded only by my slowness in formalising my ideas in a book proposal. In this respect, I have been approaching things in a rather back-to-front way; my previous practice—such as it is—has always been to tackle the proposal first before starting to write the book itself (or, at least, before having written very much of it). My slowness—or, more properly, my reluctance in this case—stems from three concerns: first, my uncertainty over the likely length of the final book and its number of chapters; second, the difficulty I have in estimating how long the book will actually take me to finish; and third, my seeming inability to identify a title for the book that I am happy with.

While I have a well-developed sense of the book’s overall structure in terms of chronology, key episodes, and themes, the fact that I am researching as I write, means that, quite naturally, I find the book’s focus shifting and its scope expanding. Where my previous books have been driven by their conceptual arguments, this book is somewhat different. It is driven, at the same time, by an act of archival recovery and an attempt to tell a particular story of empire and politics in the second half of the eighteen century through the perspective of one individual’s life. That Macintosh’s life was so varied, in terms both of historical incident and geographical experience, is what makes his story so compelling. At the same time, it is also what makes it challenging to decide how the facts of his life should be connected so as to make more than an anecdotal/empirical contribution.

While the academic “so what?” of studying Macintosh is, in some senses, easily answered in terms of what it reveals about the making and mobility of ideas of empire, about authority and influence over political decision making, about the transnational circulation of ideas, and the mechanisms and consequences of forgetting, identifying one of those as the most significant—and the one on which to hang the book’s wider conceptual contribution—is more challenging.

That Macintosh’s trajectory through life connected the geographically disparate locations of the Highlands of Scotland in the shadow of the Jacobite rising, the colonial Caribbean in the decades around the Seven Years’ War, the Early American Republic, British India, France on the eve of Revolution, counterrevolutionary Switzerland, and late-Enlightenment Saxony makes it possible to tell a comparatively transnational story of the eighteenth century, but it does also make it difficult to know how best to pitch the book—in terms of its title—in such a way as to advertise its relevance to area/period specialists. How will scholars working in these areas know that the book has something to say to them?

Almost six years ago, I thought I had hit on the right title, The forgotten radical: William Macintosh and the transnational circulation of seditious print in the Age of Revolution, but I no longer think that does quite the right job, partly because the term “Forgotten Radical” has since then been used for a collection of Peter Maurin’s essays, partly because I have come to see that Macintosh actually vacillated between radical and conformist political stances, and partly because the focus of the book has moved to encompass more than just Macintosh’s book and its reception.

While Macintosh’s historiographical anonymity is a rationale for my project, it also presents a problem: because he has no name recognition, the book’s title must do something to indicate to the prospective reader who he was and/or why he mattered. Who Macintosh was varied, of course, considerably across his lifetime; he was variously a merchant, planter, traveller, author, political commentator, counterrevolutionary agitator, spy, prisoner, émigré, and forgotten historical actor. Which of these lives best captures his interest and relevance? Macintosh’s plurality makes it difficult to decide.

These questions could, of course, continue to swirl around my mind indefinitely, but I have committed to submitting a book proposal by the middle of September, so I will keep my fingers crossed that inspiration strikes soon.

I have been fortunate to be able take advantage of the short window of time between the relaxing of lockdown regulations and the apparent arrival of the pandemic’s third wave in the UK to return home to Scotland. In addition to undertaking archival work at the National Library and the National Records of Scotland, where I was tracking down references to Macintosh’s father in the papers of the Sutherland estate, I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon in the garden of Deirdre Grieve, William Macintosh’s great, great, great, great grandniece, whom I met first in 2014. Along with her son, Dorian, Deirdre has been an enthusiastic source of support and genealogical information since I began this project, and it was a real pleasure to bring her up to date on my work. Having spent so much time working on Macintosh in comparative isolation, being able to talk through my ideas and findings was a real confidence boost and a reminder of the fact that I am writing for a real audience (of at least two).

In the course of our chat, I was reminded that Deirdre’s own copy of Macintosh’s book contains a rather amusing marginal comment—”Blockhead”—which was clearly prompted by Macintosh’s discussion of the possibility that the earth might contain vast subsurface oceans, replete with “huge and stupendous” animals, à la Jules Verne.

The easing of lockdown restrictions in April and May has allowed me to tick off some long-overdue archival work at the British Library, the National Archives, and at the National Library of Scotland. Over a series of sessions at the BL, in particular, I have worked through a range of material from the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s concerning Macintosh’s time, respectively, in Grenada, India, and Switzerland. These sessions have thrown up lots of interesting material that will help fuel the next few months of writing.

Although archival work has taken priority this month, I have finally manage to finish a first draft of the book’s second empirical chapter, which covers the period (roughly from 1768 to 1770) when the centre of the debate over the governance of Grenada shifted from the island itself to London and sparked a pamphlet war, much of which was coordinated by Thomas Hollis. This is also the period during which Macintosh brought legal proceedings against Richard Burke over the disputed 4 ½ percent duty on Grenada’s exports and when Alexander Johnstone’s complaints against Robert Melvill were heard by the Privy Council (a hearing during which Macintosh should have served as a star witness, but didn’t). This was a complicated chapter and it has taken many months of reading and research to figure out the basic details of what actually happened, who did what, and what effects those actions had. I am, in the end, quite happy with the way the chapter has shaped up and think it offers some genuinely new insights, particularly with respect to Thomas Hollis’s role in coordinating the anti-Catholic lobby over Grenada’s governance.

One of the real highlights of this month has been reading others’ contributions on Macintosh. Emily Hayes, on the basis of some translation work she undertook on my behalf in April, wrote three fascinating guest blog posts this month. Inspired by her engagement with Macintosh’s domestic ephemera from 1780s and 1790s Provence, Emily has written wonderfully on the themes of identity, food and consumption, and transnationality. Elsewhere, Emma Rothschild has uncovered, from her own archival investigations, a particular moment of Macintosh’s Caribbean experience of which I was totally unaware. Rothschild’s work, of which I am a huge admirer, casts a long shadow over my investigation of Macintosh and it was a real thrill to read her contribution.

Looking ahead to June, I am planning to wrap up archival work at the National Records of Scotland and the British Library before moving on to tackle the book’s third empirical chapter, which will finally follow Macintosh from the Caribbean to India.

A guest blog post by Dr Emily Hayes, Oxford Brookes University.

Unlike Innes, I do not know William Macintosh intimately. Because of this, I have asked myself whether the French word rastaquouère fitted Macintosh. The term, possibly of South American origin, as Marina Warner shows, designates a flashy, or somewhat dubiously engaged, foreigner. Yet this word tells us more about the perceptions of the beholder and which are projected onto the beholden.

Certain forms of historical source are deemed to be more insightful into aspects of a life than others. Much of the Macintosh archive records its author’s own attentiveness to his material surroundings. Amidst bills for building works, foods and wine, a few words in English stand out in a letter dated 1785 about his ‘knowledge of mankind in all the stages of society, from the most savage state of nature to the highest state of civilization’, casting sudden, and what is to me a very alien, light on his outlook on to the world.

Resolving the familiar and the distant is the paradox of historical geography. Why Macintosh settled in Provence is currently unknown. The Avignon archive positions him within a network of other British and foreign expatriates in the region; people in Marseille who kept tabs on the travellers putting into Marseille to wait for favourable weather, coming and going by ship, on their ways east, north or west. Macintosh therefore exemplifies a greater historical geographical phenomenon: of people, some expatriates who, at different speeds, transited this region.

Provence has been a refuge for restless cosmopolitans for centuries. Global lives that were precluded from going home, some of their volition, others in exile or idealists and visionaries seeking an alternative home. Theirs were lives that were neither here, nor there. In reflecting upon such experiences of displacement, this last post brings together several figures connected to the region and adjacent ones.

How can historians ever imagine to have a handle on past lives, when even the people closest to us, and even our own changeable motivations, are so difficult to fathom? As a child, I puzzled over my parents’ new fascination with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1789). Today, Stevenson’s account of his journey on foot with his equine companion, Modestine, and dealings with locals, across a region just north west of Avignon, delights. In his own words, Stevenson was just “a traveller, hurrying by like a person from another planet” (p. 27). However, a number of other Scottish expatriates established longer, and more intimate, local connections.

“…both wise and fools / Wrote books, heady as wines!” A line from a poem by the Scottish natural scientist, sociologist, town planner and educationalist, Patrick Geddes which recalls Macintosh’s own inclinations. Geddes has repeatedly cropped up in my research and his resonance on turn-of-the-twentieth-century British Geography was far more pervasive than has hitherto been discerned. An international phenomenon towards whom my own inquiries have all too slowly inched, Geddes’ is a light that draws. He is best known for designing the ingenious Outlook Tower in Edinburgh. In 1924, in Montpellier—in what is now the region of Occitanie to the south west of Avignon—and building on centuries old Franco-Scottish camaraderie and transnational cooperation (established in opposition to England and the English), Geddes founded the Collège des Écossais (the Scots College). On one of the buildings there, as well as at Edinburgh’s Riddles Court, the inscription Vivendo discimus, “By living, we learn”, can be found.

The renovations and purchases of furnishings detailed in Macintosh’s papers show the extent to which he made a home for himself and his household employees in Provence. Such attentiveness to surroundings and to practicalities as well as comfort, suggests long-term settlement. But whilst Macintosh’s material life can be gleaned, the workings of his mind and motivations remain elusive. In contrast, just north of Avignon, in the Vaucluse département, Glasgow-born Kenneth White also attempted to renovate a dilapidated residence. Letters from Gourgounel (1966), named after his half-ruined property, is as much about an encounter as with place as a journey within. An interdisciplinary thinker and proponent of the terms géopoétiques and intellectual nomadism, it is France and French thought, rather than, the UK or Anglophone literature, that has allocated White a place. Macintosh’s days in Province ended as the French Revolution took effect in the region and he went into exile, first in Switzerland and then in Germany. For the fortunate, the habit and means of travel can imbue the freedom of physical as much as intellectual movement. The multiple marriages and career of Elizabeth von Arnim, an Australian-born proto-feminist crossed both the British and German Empires. Von Armin’s disregard for the restrictions of convention is pervasive throughout her now Virago-published novels, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), The Caravaners (1909), and All The Dogs of My Life (1936). The latter, especially, captures her sojourn in Mougins, the oscillations of her heart and the vicissitudes of turn-of-the-century women’s transnational lives with vim and bite.

The gastronomic and oenophile tastes of Macintosh would have delighted another local transnational, the German-born writer and food and wine amateur, Sybille Bedford. After a childhood shuttling across Europe, the most physically, if not emotionally, settled periods of her teenage years were in Sanary-sur-Mer, a small port south east of Avignon on the Mediterranean coast. To the extent that she could be, she was anchored there. Her Italian stepfather set up an interior design company servicing the needs of a community of expatriates and second home owners. Aldous Huxley became a father figure to her. As World War Two turned from prospect to actuality, the region harboured a wave of immigrants from Germany and central Europe, including dissident authors such as Thomas Mann. With her Jewish ancestry, Bedford too became a refugee forced to relocate to the US. A Compass Error (1968), and other semi-autobiographical narratives about her family and social circles, shows that open-mindedness and multiculturalism are not necessarily tethered. For all her cosmopolitanism, her intellectual immersion, her non-conforming loves, she expressed what today registers as an all too pedestrian snobbery.

Nature morte is French for the English “still life”. Each term suggests quite different processes. Whichever way you read it, the former’s emphasis on death is morbid, whilst the latter conveys a sense of contemplation of a mystery. As historical geographers, we image and contour the proportions of phenomena human and non-human. We fathom, reckon and triangulate off coordinates that we think that we know, our need for certainty side-lining the weakness of resolution of our approximate and provisional quality of understanding to which artists and art historians are more acutely sensitised. In researching, we travel, explore and investigate so as to capture what can only ever be a spatially and temporally particular view of the variegated lights of past lives, including our own.

The lives of Macintosh and the latter-day transnationals (and including Jonathan Meades who, though not discussed here, shares with Macintosh and the others interests in architecture and food) were not still. Yet still they mystify and give life.

Cosmopolitan drift was often as much topographical as it was social. If you have lived abroad you will know that, as an expatriate, hierarchies of class, wealth, status and profession are shaken up. Abroad, one might become a big fish in a small pond, the opposite of the position occupied in one’s notional homeland. Macintosh’s papers show that his acquaintances crossed through the social spectrum of locals and a community of aristocratic circles. The transcending of the hierarchies of class and status, and other projected categories, was afforded to these, ultimately, everyday figures who are no more or less interesting, or significant, than any others. Fusion and confusion as they attempted to integrate and account for the shifting sums of their being, and accrual of experiences, across sliding scales of time and space, was their lot. 

The social constituency (my thanks to Simon Naylor for teaching me that term) of travellers, as the Belgium-born and later French naturalised anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss knew, was only distinguished by degrees of temporal and spatial exposure, from that of explorers and, by extension, ethnographers and expatriates. Aspects of the aforementioned figures evidence that neither lifestyle (whether imposed or chosen) dictates or guarantees anything much in particular. Neither humanity, nor humility, nor open-mindedness, nor local or global concerns are automatically derived from transnationalism, nor from any other form of inherited, imposed or self-ascribed identity, or given place, education, politics or profession. And conversely, neither does staying, nor rootedness engender kindness, empathy or the investment in a locale. We choose how we perceive, think, and act in, the world and are educated and enculturated into doing so. This is not yet a global privilege or right. The precise impact of Provence and the extent of Macintosh’s inward travel there are, as yet, undiscerned. Although places, composed of people, draw us as much as we draw them, the lights that we bring transform the quality, scale and colour of our perceptions and the accents placed in our attempts to portray them. Through different materials we journey, explore, investigate and, depending on how you define home, locate and expatriate, ourselves and others. The motions of the inner compasses that guide and measure puzzle. If referents are not common then everything becomes historical geography.

William Macintosh had a restless mind and a restless pen, and the networks within which his letters and ideas circulated were large and complex. For those reasons I was always slightly surprised that I had not been able to find any evidence that he corresponded with Joseph Banks, who was, in many ways, right at the centre of late-Enlightenment networks of epistolary exchange. It seemed almost inconceivable, given the flow of letters across Banks’s desk, and Macintosh’s penchant for firing off letters to the great and the good, that there was not at least one from Macintosh. There was, of course; I had just failed to spot it.

Yesterday I noticed that the Royal Society holds a 1782 letter from Macintosh to Banks, in which he submitted to the Society’s attention a model of a rope pump. According to the letter, the machine had been shown to Macintosh in Paris the previous winter by its inventor, a man “in poor circumstances”. Macintosh claimed to have encouraged the inventor to send a model of the machine to Britain, “where the ingenuity of an alien would meet with encouragement and reward”, but not having done so, Macintosh felt himself “justified in having the model made and improving upon it”.

This letter immediately explains the presence in Macintosh’s archive of a set of calculations (above) describing the “Quantity of Water raised by the Rope-pump as improved by Mackintosh [sic]”. For years I have wondered about that document—why it was there, what it related to—and the letter to Banks finally offers an explanation. I look forward to reading the letter in full when the Royal Society’s library reopens, but, for now, I can tick off one of the thousand-or-so outstanding questions I have about Macintosh, his world, and its traces.

A guest blog post by Dr Emily Hayes, Oxford Brookes University.

Le vin, c’est de la géographie liquide, wine is liquid geography, according to the French geographer, Érik Orsenna. At the online conference organised by the French Société de Géographie to commemorate the bicentenary of its foundation in December 2020, this quote was returned to again and again. A French man talking about wine, what a cliché… On reflection, perhaps it should not surprise.

As fans of the French TV drama Engrenages know, liquide in French signifies cash, specifically the sort that flows readily and becomes difficult to trace. I am not an economic historian, but William Macintosh’s financial affairs seem somewhat murky. Documents suggest that he may have owned shares in the Paris Water Company and derived an income stream from other bodies. Orsenna’s quote seems, to use a word that I know that I absorbed from Innes Keighren’s PhD, apposite. Some of that income, Macintosh invested in living and eating well in the south of France. The bills and receipts in his archives evidence this.

For example, the archives hold a 1785 bill for bottles of Château Margaux wine from the Bordeaux region to the west (Macintosh specified the 1781 cuvée), but also a barrel of everyday wine for drinking ‘with friends’. France has strong regional qualities. Being familiar with rural life in the country, and the standard practices of sociability and ways of integrating a community, I imagined that the latter might have been drunk with some of the many visiting workmen or tradespeople that we know Macintosh or one of his manservants, John Heffernan or Joseph, engaged with. Perhaps this wine was for an end-of-day aperitif. Perhaps sharing a glass of wine facilitated Macintosh’s language learning.

The papers also document a purchase of Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine, from a vineyard just to the north of Avignon. I myself bought a bottle (of white, as it is cheaper than the red) from this vineyard, located above the Rhône river valley, when on an archaeological dig near the town of Orange in my twenties. Later, back in the north of France, it was like uncorking pure sunshine.

Certain words are transformed when you read them. More than ink scrawled on paper, the fragrances of the objects to which they refer waft off the screen. Their tastes imagined and conjured in the mouth. A 1784 bill in the archive listed spices, cinnamon, cardamom, saffron as well as tea, coffee and sugar—foods that are today everyday ingredients in my own kitchen cupboard and handled so regularly that the mind cannot help but make the research experience more vivid.

A bill (undated) for metal work on a hook for hanging a lantern also included the cost of two bottles of tarragon vinegar. Such papers are often just scraps containing only a few scrawled lines, but upon reading them, imaginary conversations and promises being made as to how source good local products come into view.

Meat consumption appears to have been substantial with numerous receipts for beef, lamb, veal, hams and boiling hens. As well as oil, Macintosh’s cook used white lard, still a feature of Provençal cuisine today. Alongside these foods, the household expenses record the consumption of salads, artichokes and lemons.

Bread was a generously consumed staple. However, one 1784 document reveals household hierarchies: one type of bread for servants and another for les maîtres, the masters. These bills were important as they not only detail what was consumed, but also who consumed it. They, thus, provide insights into the numbers of servants, and their roles, who lived with Macintosh. They also show that visitors to the house were frequent—offering, perhaps, further evidence of French sociability.

In a failure of the imagination on my part, when I participated in archaeological digs, it became a pattern that I was more interested in historical sources rather than archaeological ones, and the contemporary landscapes and people around a site. The food especially drew me. Similarly, the wine and food consumption of Macintosh and his household is what stands out for me from the archival assemblage of bills, receipts and letters dating from the 1780s and 1790s. The occupants of Macintosh’s house enjoyed cream and a bill for the chilled cream deserts bavarois a la crème jumped off the screen, when I came across it.

Les palourdes, or clams, also known in Provence as les clovisses pop up amongst the bills. The French author Marc Le Gros, in his book Éloge de la palourde (2009), or Ode to the Clam, claims that the clam is discrete and its inner life all ‘rythme, cadence’. The archaeological record shows that Mesolithic hunter and gatherers in what we now call Provence consumed clams millennia ago. On the dig that I worked on there, we cooked up huge pots of this cheap and readily available source of protein, an ideal quick, light meal in the warm south. Surely the mechanics of eating clams with your hands, sucking out the flesh and sauce from the shell and throwing out those which remain closed, do not change? Though it is unknown who in Macintosh’s household consumed this sea food, such familiar experiences seemingly transcend time and make one feel connected to the historical figures of study. The Macintosh papers compounded a longing in my bones and every cell of my body for France which returns with seasonal regularity, especially in the spring. And it was the lists, described here, of what would be called produits du terroir, locally sourced products, which did it.

A guest blog post by Dr Emily Hayes, Oxford Brookes University.

Over the last few years I have intermittently assisted Dr Innes Keighren with his research into the Scottish plantation owner and trader William Macintosh who lived in and around Avignon during the 1780s and 1790s. The transcription and translation work that I undertook provoked some reflections upon my own European and cross-Channel upbringing, education and identity. What follows are some thoughts about my experience of working with multilingual archives, language learning and the teaching and learning practices of historical geography.

During my own recent research I came across a few lines in the British geographer, Halford Mackinder’s The Teaching of Geography and History: A Study in Method (1914), which resonated: in a little-known sensitive moment, Mackinder compared a child to a ‘little observatory’. A child who moves around a lot ‘sees many things but never sees thoroughly, in perspective and with correlation, the little universe which is accessible from any one home.’ A teacher’s aim, he said, was training a child ‘to obtain its bearings’ (p. 15). I often contemplate this claim and the implications that I interpret from it. Yet I am not sure that I agree with it.

Between the age of ten and sixteen I attended seven schools in three different countries. In 1988, when I was ten years old, my parents, in search of the good life or at least an escape from Thatcherite Britain, decided to move to France. As in the tiny school which is documented in the film Être et avoir (2002), my first French school was a small establishment in the village of Renescure in France’s northernmost region. My own CM2, or fourth junior year, class consisted of eleven pupils. We shared our class room, and teacher, with the ten pupils of the year group below (CM1). Somehow, Mme Delattre, our Maîtresse, taught both year groups at once. Enthused by the incipient European Community project that was then taking place, she had bravely agreed to take me on, a British girl with very little French, in what was already a complicated situation. She called me un pigeon voyageur, a messenger pigeon, because though I had just transferred from a UK school, I had also then recently, aged ten, spent four months at the American International School in Budapest in Hungary. There, before the Berlin Wall came down, I had a new form of mathematics, US spellings and what felt like a very alien American history and geography, drilled into me by new learning methods such as spelling bees and the dreaded public speaking. A discussion of the diverse teaching/learning methods and combined teaching of Histoire-Géo in France (excellent in my experience) might feature in a later post. At the time I just tried to keep on adapting.

Returning to my work for Innes on William Macintosh’s archives, the project has spotlighted a number of points about geography and language. The documents, many of them household bills and private correspondence, are often multilingual. They are written in both French and English and sometimes and to varying degrees, a mixture of both. Rather than solely or automatically pretentiously cosmopolitan, I believe that this was, and still is, reflective of daily life for many expatriates. Marina Warner brilliantly shows this to be the case in her fascinating and culturally critical memoire about her Anglo-Italian childhood in end-of-Empire Egypt, Inventory Of A Life Mislaid (2021, especially pp 221–34): expatriates speak, think with and, often, write in an idiosyncratic and unorthodox jumble of languages between themselves, and depending on the purpose.

As Innes’s previous blog posts have demonstrated, William Macintosh’s name appears in a spectacular array of variations across his extensive archive. My recent work on Macintosh suggested a relatively high literacy rate amongst the local tradespeople, many of them men, in and around Avignon in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Only one document recorded that the author signed their name with an ‘X’ because they could not write. However, it also showed that the many local tradespeople who billed Macintosh, related this foreign name to words that they already knew in French. For example, my favourite recently discovered variant of Macintosh was Mr le marquis decintosh, in a document written by Roubaud, a builder or estate manager, dated 7 September 1784. The writer attributed an aristocratic title to Macintosh because that is what he heard (rather than saw on paper) in the name ‘Macintosh’.

In relative terms, across all times and spaces, verbal and non-verbal methods of communication, rather than textual ones, have been the dominant means of negotiating human relations. In reading the documents, and again because of the many spelling variations in them, it was as if I started to hear the words on the page spoken by their authors. I wondered whether one of the bills had not been written by a French person (anonymous and undated) who was reporting the spoken words voiced by a person with a strong British accent as, for example, in the document which records Macintosh living in the Rue de lay garden meaning les jardins. Or was this just my imagination…?

The likelihood of spelling variations becomes higher and more common when you juggle phonemes, i.e. the blocks of sounds, in several languages. After six years of school in France, at sixteen, I discovered the hard way, that my written English was very bad. This was despite the fact that I was privileged to have access to thousands of books at home (as in Macintosh’s library, many of them were travel books, but unlike Macintosh’s library, there were also numerous histories of socialism and communism!) and that I was a keen reader. Over the years, as a family we increasingly spoke French or combined French and English. At school, I wrote and read in French (or German, Spanish or Latin), but never in English (and I did not study English as a second language either). The lesson then was that constant training and the need to regularly practice the multiple interconnected oral, aural and textual skills is necessary in the acquisition of language and, doubtless, other skills. For this a community is vital.

Over the years I have had to force myself to keep a running mental list of ‘false friends’ or the words which sound the same—or which have practically but not quite the same spelling—in English and in French. These include ‘government’ (English) and gouvernement (French); ‘parliament’ and parlement; ‘environment’ and environnement; ‘organization’ and organisation, ‘development’ and développement and ‘character’ and caractère, to name a few. For non-native language learners especially, homophone words which sound the same, such as ‘their’ and ‘there,’ are also problematic. Now, at the age of 42, I still have to pause, think and often check these spellings.

In growing up, the historical geographies of my own vocabulary—or vocabularies—have been brought into sharp relief. Reflecting my own travels and geographical movements, I am aware of where and when a specific word came on to my radar or when it became a word that I needed to use regularly. Having studied for an MSc in archaeology and environmental science jointly run by the Sorbonne and Nanterre in Paris, my knowledge of botany and, more broadly, the histories of French land management (and thus, by extension, geographical thought and methods) is in French (and to a lesser extent in Latin). The MSc dissertation that I wrote in French about organic residues and inclusions in pottery from the putative Empire of Mali in West Africa has also endowed me with a niche vocabulary that is organised, at least initially, in French in my mind. This recent work for Innes showed me that words such as vigne and vinaigre are ones that I know the spelling of in French first. I was stumped when it came to spelling their equivalents of ‘vine’ and ‘vinegar’, in English.

Yet, to that I would add, that although I have a mental habit of picturing in my mind’s eye equivalent words in several languages, one is never really fully bilingual in any language; it is a commonplace to say that language constantly evolves, but our individual linguistic needs constantly develop in additive and subtractive ways alike, according to opportunities of context, exposure and habit.

A further difference between French and English is that writing styles vary tremendously. This too can be seen in the Macintosh materials as letters and other documents penned by native French speakers (Le Seigneur de Ragnoni mentioned in Innes’s latest blog post, for instance) write sentences that are Proustian in length both in terms of the number of words that are set in motion and the clauses after clauses which pile up. A single comma does so many things in French. This style of writing was one that I too acquired and which, when I attempt to write in English and especially in academic English, I have to resist. Written short, staccato sentences and sharp syntax still rarely feel natural to me.

In undertaking more work on Macintosh, I was surprised to discover that the years that I grew up in la France profonde, or deep rural France, in both Les Hauts de France on the border with Belgium, and the Eure in Normandy, had provided an excellent basis for approaching Macintosh’s archive. Devoted to country life and day-to-day existence in small town France, as they are, many of the documents concern land management, household repairs and renovations. Others, which deal with horse management, suggest that Macintosh stabled up to five horses. Words such as licol (harness), selle (saddle), grenier à foin (hay loft) and maréchal-ferrant (farrier as distinct from ‘a smith’),and vermifuge (worming medicine) came naturally. As did brouette (wheel barrow) and chaux (lime white wash). The truth is that in rural France today you would still find, and your existence would likely depend upon, the goodwill and work of many in the very same tradespeople and suppliers as those documented in Macintosh’s archive.

The documents suggest that Macintosh’s understanding of French, and written fluency in it, was excellent. Where, when and with whom he initially learned it is, I think, unknown—Innes has mentioned to me that Macintosh had not yet mastered the language when he first arrived on the largely Francophone island of Grenada in 1763. However, textual traces, nevertheless, constitute only partial evidence. Macintosh may have used a dictionary when writing. He may have found gaps in his vocabulary and frequently had to learn new words. Written documents rarely record regional accents. What did Macintosh’s spoken French sound like? How well did he handle the formal and informal registers of French speech? Did he have a Scottish accent? It is likely that he did not speak French with what is called l’accent du sud or the ‘southern accent’. So, I ask myself what Macintosh’s life as an expatriate and, perhaps, the communication problems he experienced, were really like.

As Hungary, and then France (and later Japan and other places), did for me, even short periods abroad can mark you profoundly and dramatically change the course of your life. I therefore wondered whether Macintosh ever considered Avignon as home or as a home. Was he ever accepted as a local or did he remain an outsider both in his mind and in those of those around him? If so, then how did he feel about this? What insights into the idea of a ‘universal’ human nature, and to which he adhered, did this give him? How did a decade or so in southern, rural France change him? What linguistic, or other, legacy did he leave in Avignon? How did he change the people and the place he eventually left behind?

My own cross-Channel education and life is inscribed in my mind and its shaping, and is manifested in my writing and spoken language in French and English. This is the basis for my feeling disposed of the English language, but also of my belief in regularly correcting students’ spelling mistakes: to take writing and spelling seriously is to take yourself seriously; to be able to write well and to spell correctly is to be taken seriously in life. And yet I still make mistakes… In addition, this makes me aware of the fact that I am stronger at learning to speak languages than I am learning to write them.

There are also broader, and perhaps more important, points to make here about cultural hierarchies and the over-privileging of text-based knowledge, histories and communities as well as particular languages and registers of language.

As many readers will know, in 1994 France ratified the Toubon law which stipulated that only French words should be used in government, parliamentary and public communications. This protectionist measure was, it was claimed, taken as a form of cultural conservation. Today, at a time when there continues to be concern about, as well as rampant resistance to, anglophone dominance in academia, the Macintosh archive evidences, across a number of human and spatial scales, the longevity, and pre-twentieth-century history, of the international hybridization and intermixing of the French and English languages.

Additionally, the research on Macintosh suggests the urgency of writing, but also of relocating within existing histories, what are called popular histories. My own work on popular geography and historical geographies of magic lantern practices indicates the need for this reconfiguration. Across the centuries-long and global histories of magic lantern use, and across Macintosh’s lifetime, most people around the world did not read or write. However, cross-cultural communication took place because of the common referents of a stock of shared mental images, emotions and sensations.

Though I lived, studied and worked in regions of northern France and Paris, many aspects of Macintosh and his retinue’s late eighteenth-century existence in the south of the country feel eerily familiar and little different from what I have known from the 1980s on. Here French food-related trades are especially revealing as the archives attest to the fact that Macintosh treated himself to the finer things in life. In another guest blog post I would like to discuss the archive’s feast of flavours, dishes, and words in relation to haptic and sensory historical methods.

I want to conclude by referring back to the image of the sculpture titled ‘Cheeky Little Astronomer’ (2013) by the British-Nigerian artist, Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962), as well as the quote from Mackinder at the top of this post. Further research on what this might have meant in terms of Mackinder’s own education is necessary here. The ‘little observatory’ of a child does, undoubtedly, need some fixed coordinates, but these reference points do not have to be geographical or, rather, the topographical, cultural and linguistic scale of these references does not have to be narrow, static or singular. The celestial and earthly constellations which astronomers, but also historical geographers, observe and to which they affix knowledge are incessantly moving. Coordinates can therefore be values which transcend, and reflect what lies beneath, the trappings of time, place, people and language.

I have long known that Macintosh visited Rome (he bought several books there in late 1790), but the details of his visit have remained sketchy. Thanks to some recent translation work done for me by Dr Emily Hayes of some of the French-language material in Macintosh’s archive, I am beginning now to get a better sense of what might have prompted the visit.

One document in particular, written by André Rangoni, the Pope’s Consul General in Marseille, is particularly revealing. Emily’s summary of the document shows that the memoir itself is primarily a request to Rome to increase the allowance paid to Rangoni (and to his elder brother) on account of various out-of-pocket expenses incurred in undertaking their duties—hiring additional staff, issuing poor relief, providing hospitality to visiting dignitaries, etc., etc.

Rangoni goes on, however, to recommend Macintosh as a friend and ally to Rome and notes that Macintosh would make an excellent Consul to the Court of Rome owing to his zeal, honesty, and trustworthiness (were an adequate salary to be offered). The memoir notes that Macintosh has discussed this potential role with the Pope’s nephew, “la Sainteté Monsr. le Duc Braschi“.

Some of the material I looked at in the British Library last week offers further details about Macintosh’s experiences in Italy, but it will take some time to piece it all together into a coherent narrative. While it is clear that Macintosh never took up the role, it is likely that the possibility of it was at least partly responsible for his visit to Rome in 1790. While I am very keen to know more (did he have an audience with Pope Pius VI?), I am having to resist the strong temptation to extend my search to the Vatican archives where, undoubtedly, there might be something to dig up on Macintosh. Macintosh’s world is one seemingly without end, and I have to leave some of its corners for others to explore.

Today marks the midway point of my (extended) Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship: eight months down, eight to go. This is a good moment, therefore, to take stock of where I am and what I still need to do. As much as it might feel to me like I have got nowhere and that I still have an infinite amount of work remaining, I know this is an illusion; I have probably made more progress in the last eight months than I have in the preceding eight years. Most significantly, perhaps, since mid November I have written, across sixty-two days, a little over 50,000 words (inclusive of notes). The problem is, however, that all those words relate to what was, in my original plan (see above), a single 15,000-word chapter dealing with Macintosh’s time in the Caribbean. In the process of writing, that chapter has not only expanded in length, but has, in fact, split into two chapters, the second of which is still nowhere near being finished!

In addition to the book’s introduction and conclusion, I still have about four and a half empirical chapters to write. If my experience in writing the first chapter(s) is anything to go by, these are all likely to be longer than I had planned and may even multiply in unexpected ways. Although a lot of these words will almost certainly hit the cutting-room floor at some point in the future, I am finding it difficult to make those editorial decisions as I go—I feel I have to write this out in full first in order to understand the material before going back to narrow and tighten the focus at a later date. The reason I think this is so is two-fold: 1) the near-total absence of any secondary literature on Macintosh means that I cannot rely on other sources to do the work of summary and explanation for me and 2) because the book is driven by the empirical goal of understanding Macintosh’s world and words, rather than by a more narrowly defined conceptual contribution, it is much more difficult to draw a boundary around what material matters and what does not. In that respect, this book is so much more difficult to write than those I have worked on in the past: there is, in effect, no body of existing literature and the scope is potentially without limit.

All that being said, I would very much like to be able to have a first draft of all the empirical chapters by the end of the calendar year. I honestly do not know if that is realistic, but I know that if I return to my normal duties in January next year with a lot of empirical research and writing still to do, it will be the work of years rather than months to finish.

I was very fortunate this month to secure (in the great academic lottery of ticket allocations) a couple of slots at the British Library and the National Archives. This has allowed me to finally follow up on a number of archival leads I have been waiting to chase for many months. The material in the British Library relates to Macintosh’s time in India and his years as a counterrevolutionary in Switzerland, and that at the National Archives to his time in the Caribbean. While I still need to digest much of this material—the short period allowed for visits (3 hours at the BL, 5 hours at TNA) means that I prioritised photographing material rather than transcribing it—I was pleased to find confirmation, in a letter from Macintosh to Charles Jenkinson, 1st Earl of Liverpool, that he (Macintosh) was the author of a 1781 pamphlet, The Origin and Authentic Narrative of the Present Marratta War. Although I had known this was a possibility, it is really helpful to have proof of it. In the same letter, Macintosh also provided Jenkinson with “the unarranged production of my enquiries during some months residence & travels in India” (i.e., an early version of what would become Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa).

This month I have also had the invaluable assistance of Dr Dean Bond and Dr Emily Hayes—working as freelance researchers—in dealing with (respectively) German and French sources. I have written before about how this project depends upon the advice and help of a veritable village of other scholars and that has been particularly true with respect to dealing with non-English sources. Dean has kindly been looking through German reviews of Travels (in both its English and translated versions) and Emily has been working through the material from Macintosh’s time in Avignon, mainly the very many receipts he kept from those years. Meanwhile, Jaz Bigden (who is undertaking a placement as part of the MSc in Global Futures at Royal Holloway) is working on an inventory of Macintosh’s first letterbook and my dad, Alex, has been continuing to lend his assistance, gratis, with various transcription tasks. It is no exaggeration to say that I could not do this project without their help.