Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with Deirdre Grieve (née Chapman), a long-time supporter of this project and a direct descendant of William Macintosh’s sister, Mary.
At the end of September, the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh will be hosting a launch event for Dierdre’s new novel, Badlands, which will be published by Vagabond Voices in October. Tickets are free and can be booked online here.
The recording of my inaugural lecture, “The archive in the armoire: rediscovering the global lives of William Macintosh,” was recently posted online. Although the recording doesn’t include my personal highlight—which was the very generous vote of thanks offered by my colleague, Felix Driver—it is otherwise a good substitute for those who were unable to attend in person.
Although my research has focused on identifying those who read Macintosh’s Travels, I had not really considered the possibility that there might exist an altogether different category of reader: the imaginary, or fictional. One such reader is the protagonist of the 1877 Spanish novel, El Guante Gris: a poor 28-year-old Flemish man, Flavio Albieh.
The novel sees Flavio reunite with an old school friend, Alberto Layland, in Ghent, where the pair commiserate over the recent deaths of their fathers. Alberto invites Flavio to spend the night in his palatial home, and Flavio is shown to a well-appointed room with a bookcase full of expensively bound travel narratives, including those by Edward Parry, John Franklin, and William Penny. Flavio’s attention is, however, taken by “los viajes de M. Makintosh en Asia, Africa y América,” and he spends a long time immersed in its pages—a distraction, of sorts, from Alberto’s strongly voiced prohibition on Flavio falling in love with Alberto’s beautiful younger sister, Ketrere, whom Flavio has just met.
Alberto, for his own part, is also lovestruck, following a chance meeting with an equally beautiful mixed-race woman from Whydah in West Africa, Velia Aral-noor. To Alberto’s great disappointment, Velia is required to return to Whydah almost immediately after their meeting, leaving only a grey glove as a token, but the lovestruck Alberto immediately commits to scouring the globe to find Velia again.
Flavio, meanwhile, having read Macintosh’s “libro precioso,” is inspired to join Alberto on his quest, partly to imitate the “denodado explorador del Africa central,” and partly to distance himself from Ketrere, with whom he has already fallen hopelessly in love.
It goes without saying that the author of El Guante Gris, Aureliano Colmenares, likely cited Macintosh’s Travels based on its title alone, rather than its content, which deals hardly at all with parts of Africa that interest Flavio and Alberto. Are there other fictional readers of Travels? Only time, and yet more digging, will tell.
I have written before about Macintosh great-grandson, Georges-Fernand Dunot de Saint-Maclou, famous in the nineteenth century as the founder of the Bureau des Constatations Médicales at Lourdes. Dunot de Saint-Maclou’s life will be celebrated by a conference taking place in September, in his home town, Ouézy. Among the speakers is padre Andrea Brustolon, author of the definitive Italian-language biography of il dottore della grotta.
Despite almost a decade and a half on Macintosh’s archival trail, new discoveries continue to take me by surprise. I have spent some time recently working through material at the National Archives relating to Macintosh’s time as a counterrevolutionary spy in Bern in the 1790s. Although it will be some time before I am able to write about this period (in the chronology of the book, I am still in 1780!), I have been keen to gather as many sources as I can for this phase of his life, so that I have a better sense of what I will be dealing with when the time comes. What took me by surprise in this material, most particularly, was a letter sent by Macintosh to his Foreign Office contact, George Canning, in February 1799. The previous year, Macintosh had fled from Bern when Switzerland was invaded by France, and had taken up residence in Stuttgart.
Perhaps conscious that his value to the counterrevolutionary movement was waning, and (as ever) complaining of ill health and insufficient funds, Macintosh proposed yet another reinvention in his personal and professional life. His letter to Canning was, in effect, a request for a favour. Could Canning pull some strings, Macintosh wondered, to have him assigned to Lord Elgin‘s (he of the Parthenon sculptures infamy) new embassy to Constantinople? Macintosh imagined that his particular combination of knowledge and experience would be valuable to Elgin: “It is possible, & even very probable,” he told Canning, “that my knowledge of the British concerns, relation, & future views with Asia, Africa, and the Levant in general, might prove occasionally useful to his Lordship”.
In anticipation of an affirmative response, Macintosh planned to leave Stuttgart for Erlangen or Nuremberg, which were “upon the ordinary high road to Vienna”, so that, presumably, he would be better-placed to make an onward journey. I know from other sources that Macintosh did make it to Nuremberg, but his hopes of joining Elgin’s embassy clearly came to nothing; he was still in Germany, in Offenbach, in November 1801.
In some respects, this episode is entirely in keeping with Macintosh’s modus operandi, yet it still took me by surprise; his appetite for reinvention still present, even in his early 60s. Given how minutely some periods of Macintosh’s life are detailed in surviving sources, I find the obscurity of his final dozen-or-so years tricky to analyse and narrate. Each newly encountered source for this period is, therefore, particularly valuable in providing some sense of his trajectory from counterrevolutionary spy to purportedly penurious exile in Eisenach.
For some time I have suspected that the Vatican archives might contain some archival trace of Macintosh’s visit to Rome in 1790/91, and of his dealings with Pope Pius VI and his cardinal secretary of state, Francesco Saverio de Zelada. There is, of course, a significant gap between suspicion and certainty, particularly when it comes to an archival collection that is difficult to make sense of, or plan to consult, at a distance. More than once I have lingered on the website of the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, and wondered about the slightly intimidating access requirements (necessitating a letter of recommendation, proof of academic credentials, etc., etc.) and the difficulty of knowing what they actually hold, in the absence of an externally accessible catalogue.
A considerable amount of work has been done by scholars in recent decades—particularly those working from the mid 1980s on the University of Michigan’s Vatican Archives Project—to develop catalogues and guides to the more than 85 linear kilometres of material that comprise the Vatican archives. Such work has led to the publication of Vatican Archives: An Inventory and Guide to the Historical Documents of the Holy See (1998), under the editorship of Francis X. Blouin, Jr., and other more thematically focused catalogues, like the multi-volume La rivoluzione francese (1787-1799). Repertorio delle fonti archivistiche e delle fonti a stampa conservate in Italia e nella Città del Vaticano, which is available for free on the website of the Direzione generale Archivi.
While such sources make it easier to visualise the organisation of the archive, and to develop a sense of where relevant information might be found, it is still somewhat confusing and intimidating for a first-time user such as myself. I was fortunate, therefore, to benefit recently from a conversation with the University of Kent historian Ambrogio A. Caiani, who has worked extensively in the Vatican archives, most particularly in researching his 2021 book, To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII. Hearing about Ambrogio’s first-hand experience was extremely useful from a practical point of view and also reignited my eagerness to pursue Macintosh’s archival trail to the Eternal City.
Following my meeting with Ambrogio, I returned to my familiar haunt of Google Books to try a series of new searches in the hope that I might find a definitive link between Macintosh and the Vatican archives. Although I have searched for Macintosh (in various forms of orthography) thousands of times over the years, the algorithm that presents Google Book search results is not particularly intuitive and often won’t return specific results for Macintosh unless paired with another relevant search term, such as a date or a name. To my great surprise and satisfaction, I was able to find Macintosh in the Vatican archives (or at least catalogued in vol. 1 of La rivoluzione francese, by searching for his name (as “Mac Intosh”) alongside the phrase “segretario di stato”. This is not the first time that a search result has only come up when paired with some other term; I learned about Macintosh’s role as a counterrevolutionary spy in Switzerland only when searching for him along with the word “Berne”.
I was delighted to find this reference, reproduced above, even if it is only to a handful of letters sent from Macintosh to Zelada in 1791, as it provides reassurance that an eventual trip to Rome will pay dividends. I strongly suspect that there is other material from, or about, Macintosh yet to be identified, both at the Vatican archives and at the Archivio di Stato di Roma, but it is nice to know where to begin. As ever with this project, the more I look, the more there is to see.
Last Friday, while I was guiding thirty undergraduate students around Cyprus, this blog turned thirteen. A number of the students had been kind enough during our trip to ask about my research, and the revelation that I had been working on this particular project since their early years at primary school was a shock to them (and to me!). While previous efforts to mark the birthday of this blog have often provoked a sense of anxiety on my part about how much time has elapsed since it began, and about how much work there is still to do, I am in the very fortunate position this year of having secured a 12-month research fellowship, beginning in September, that will allow me to bring this project to a close and to finish the book. The details of the fellowship are still under a publicity embargo, so I cannot name the funder, but I am both beyond grateful and indescribably relieved to have been awarded it. Knowing that I will have the time to finish the book feels like an especially privileged opportunity given the crisis that is currently gripping higher education in the UK and internationally, including at my own institution which last week opened a voluntary severance scheme. I am equally fortunate also to have gained a new editor, the book historian Marie-Claude Felton, who was kind enough to take me on as an orphaned author after my previous editor, the terrifically supportive Richard Baggaley, moved on to a freelance and consultancy role at the end of 2023.
When I mark this blog’s fourteenth birthday, a year from now, I hope to have all the book’s empirical chapters complete and to be well on my way to a full draft of the manuscript. Famous last words, of course!
The archive in the armoire: rediscovering the global lives of William Macintosh
18:15, 20 May 2025, Moore Building Auditorium,
Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham Hill, Egham, TW20 0EX.
During his remarkable and restlessly mobile lifetime, William Macintosh (1737–1813) was many things: colonial legislator, world traveller, prisoner of war, best-selling author, papal advisor, counterrevolutionary spy, and self-proclaimed citizen of the world. His work was read by Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith, he corresponded with Joseph Banks and George Washington, and dined with Aaron Burr and the Princesse de Talleyrand. Yet, today, Macintosh is almost entirely unknown. For more than a decade, Professor Keighren has been working to recover Macintosh from the shadows and to understand what his forgotten world and words can tell us about slavery, war, and the contested politics of British imperialism in the eighteenth century. Drawing on an unstudied archive of Macintosh’s personal papers, hidden in a wardrobe in Avignon and seized at the height of the French Revolution, Professor Keighren offers a fascinating insight into Macintosh’s forgotten life and why it still matters. Spanning the Caribbean, South Asia, and Europe, this lecture shows how one life can illuminate a global history.
For more information, and to register for a ticket, please visit the event listing page.
I have written before about Macintosh’s curious efforts in 1782 to facilitate an entrée into the scientific establishment in London by submitting to the Royal Society his plans for an improved rope pump—an ingenious device for raising water using ropes and pulleys alone. In his covering letter to Joseph Banks, Macintosh mentioned that he had been introduced to the pump the previous winter in Paris by its original inventor, a man living “in low circumstances”. Macintosh did not name the man, but claimed to have had his blessing to showcase the design (subsequently “improved”) to scientific circles in London.
A little digging today has revealed the name of the original inventor: Charles-Vincent Vera, a postal employee living on the rue Plâtrière (later the rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, where, coincidentally, the auction of Mirabeau’s library took place). Contemporary accounts suggest that Vera’s invention, elegant in its simplicity and apparently inspired by observing how much water a rope dipped into a well would bring back with it to the surface, created something of a sensation when it was exhibited in 1781. Vera was commended by the Académie des Sciences, and his invention was subject to considerable discussion in the press, being covered in the Gazette d’Agriculture (5 January 1782), the Mercure (26 January 1782), and in multiple issues of the Journal de Paris, among other places.
Vera’s invention was very quickly subject to multiple experiments, adaptations, and proposed improvements by a range of entrepreneurial or scientifically minded individuals, such as Antoine Deparcieux, professor physics at the College de Navarre, who published a long dissertation on the subject in 1782. Macintosh was, in that sense, just one of many who sought to capitalise on Vera’s invention in the years immediately following is discovery. Knowing who the mysterious inventor was is important, however, when it comes to reconstructing Macintosh’s activities in Paris in 1781 when, it seems, he was pivoting between settling Thomas Lewin’s annuity on Catherine Grand and being transfixed by Vera’s rope pump on the rue Plâtrière.
Vera, for his part, was eventually rewarded for his invention. In May 1795, the Revolutionary National Convention, resolved that the then-sixty-year-old Vera be awarded a pension of 400 livres per year. He would have drawn that pension for more than a dozen years before his death, on the rue Saint-Sébastien, in 1808.
Last week, Christie’s auctioned a particularly attractive copy of the sale catalogue of the library of the Comte de Mirabeau. Despite an estimate of US$2,500 at the upper end, the book eventually sold for an eye-watering US$12,000. Listing nearly 3,000 titles, the beginning of what Mirabeau hoped to be a large and open research library, the catalogue provides evidence that Mirabeau owned a copy of the first French edition of Macintosh’s Travels. Evidence of ownership is not, of course, evidence of reading, especially for a bibliophile like Mirabeau, but it is always a useful spark to further inquiry. Many of the books in Mirabeau’s library came as a job lot from the library of the Comte de Buffon, so the tantalising possibility exists that this particular copy of Macintosh’s Travels may have previously been owned by him.
All told, four editions of the French translation of Travels were published in a seven-year period straddling the Revolution: 1786, 1788, 1792, and 1793 (the first two of which, per standard practice at the time, bore the false imprint “A Londres”, while the third* advertised the translator-cum-editor, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and the real city of publication, Paris). Each of these editions circulated and was read (or not read) in ways that are difficult to identify and reconstruct over a distance of centuries. Small clues, like the catalogue of Mirabeau’s library, do, however, offer us something to go on. As ever, there is more digging to do. Onwards, onwards!
* Brissot’s name was, by the 1793 edition, again absent, possibly reflecting his changing fortunes in the year of his arrest and execution.