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 Claude-François Berthelot, engineer to the King and professor of mathematics at the École Militaire in Paris, 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.

Although I often lament how difficult it is to find time during the teaching term for research and writing, I have managed this year (somewhat to my surprise) to keep the book inching forward. There is, of course, a long way still to go, but the end of the current chapter is now just visible on the horizon, and I can imagine that one day it will be reached. Although 2025 holds in store a lot more writing, I will also have the opportunity to talk about my work on Macintosh during my professorial inaugural lecture (date TBC), a prospect about which I am both excited and trepidatious! The New Year will also, at some point, bring news of a fellowship application I submitted in the autumn which, if it were awarded, would allow me the time to finally bring the book to its close. Although I sometimes feel I could quite happily spend the next five years on the book (subject to the continued existence of the UK higher education sector, which is currently disintegrating), I want it to be done; I want the book to be out there, to find its audience, and to make its contribution. Onwards, onwards!

The final years of Macintosh’s life, spent in Eisenach in Saxony, are preserved in only a handful of sources (or only a handful that I have so far been able to find). One of the most curious and evocative is the journal of Aaron Burr, which records successive meetings with Macintosh over the course of two frigid days in January 1810. During the second meeting, Macintosh told Burr about his earlier correspondence with George Washington (about which he was evidently very proud) and that one of Washington’s letters to him was on display “in the museum at Weimar”.

Over the years I have, from time to time, idly and unsuccessfully tried to find out which museum was being referred to and have always drawn a blank—all the existing museums in the city postdating 1810 by some distance. This weekend I posted on Bluesky a plea for help in identifying the museum and, much to my surprise, the curator and environmental historian Dominik Hünniger was able to do one better and find the actual (digitised!) letter, which is now in the care of the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar. While more work needs to be done to understand where the letter was before it joined the collections of the Archiv, it’s nice to be able to tie up one of the innumerable loose ends of this project.

The historian Francis Young recently published a very interesting essay on the threat that generative AI poses to certainty in historical scholarship and, particularly, to the ability of historians to trust the secondary sources on which they must often rely. If, as is evidently already the case, AI-generated text is poisoning the well of historical scholarship, how can we know where to place our trust? As Young puts it, “In an ideal world we would all check and double check everything against the archive, of course; but that isn’t the reality. Things need to get published, discussion needs to continue; and we are all reliant on the purity of the chain of information supply to allow us to do our job”.

In the course of this long, long project I have perhaps devoted more time than is normally possible to the task of checking and double checking my sources. Partly this is because I feel a sense of obligation that what I have to say about Macintosh and his world is as well supported as it possibly can be, but it is also a function of encountering what are, for me, new areas of historical scholarship, each with their own certainties already cemented in the secondary literature. I am, in general, interested in how certain ideas become fixed in the historiography and have found, on many occasions, that unverified or inaccurate claims have circulated in the literature apparently effortlessly, becoming established through repetition as historical fact. Sometimes these can arise from something as minor as a transcription error, or the conflation of two or more individuals with similar names.

Tracing something back to the archive is not, as we know, a guarantee of certainty; primary sources are not, in and of themselves, sources of “truth”, but they are part of the foundation on which a certain type of rigour in scholarship depends. Rather than seeking to separate right from wrong in the process of checking and double checking, I find myself more interested in why it is that certain interpretations emerge, why certain stories become canonical, and what effect those canonical analyses have on the scholarship that comes afterwards. All that being said, there is an undeniable satisfaction in being able to know something with certainty (or sufficient certainty), and that most often comes from following the “chain of information” to its original source.

This was the case recently when I was able to identify, for the first time, the date on which Macintosh’s onetime ally, and former Governor of Madras, John Whitehill had died. The latter part of Whitehill’s life, spent mostly in France and significantly disrupted by the Revolution, has long been enigmatic. Driven by nothing more noble than bloody-mindedness, I have tried at intervals during the last couple of years to find some definitive evidence of Whitehill’s date of death. He was not, like Macintosh, an obscure figure, and was well known in India, Britain, and France, and I always found it puzzling that a basic piece of biographical information was so elusive.

This week I located a reference to Whitehill in the records of the Parisian notary Alexandre Pierre François Robert-Dumesnil, showing that Robert-Dumesnil had prepared an inventory, on 16 June 1812, of Whitehill’s possessions following the latter’s death. While the record did not include the date of Whitehill’s death, it did provide his address: 126 rue de Vaugirard.

With an address in hand it was possible, following the helpful advice of the UCL historian Simon Macdonald (who has separately identified Whitehill’s date of birth), to find the corresponding record of Whitehill’s demise in the table des décès for the old 10th arrondissement.

Here we can see that Whitehill died on 15 April 1812, his profession listed as rentier (one who lived off the income of his capital investments).

While it would be easy to say that none of this really matters, I think that the new disinformation age ushered in by generative AI means that these things really do matter in insuring the “purity of the chain of information supply” that Young invokes. In that spirit, I have updated John Whitehill’s Wikipedia entry with his date of death, one link in the chain secured.

Regular readers of this blog will know that my research on Macintosh has benefited hugely from the insights and encouragement of Deirdre Grieve (née Chapman), a descendant of Macintosh’s sister, whom I met for the first time a decade ago. In the intervening years, Deirdre has been kind enough to host me at her home in Glasgow for more-or-less biennial project reports. During my most recent visit in September, Deirdre shared the exciting news that she had secured a publisher for her new novel, Badlands, which is due to come out with Vagabond Voices next year.

Shortly after my visit, Deirdre was interviewed about her novel, and her life and career, by the Scottish poet Beth Junor, who has just published a video of that interview on YouTube. It is well worth a watch.

Readers of the blog might be interested in a new biographical study of Jean Paul Fonclar
de Grenier, a soldier in the Pondicherry regiment, who was a fellow passenger of Macintosh aboard the Brisson in 1778. The study’s author, Jean-Luc Brachet, was kind enough to get in touch with me during the preparation of the biography, and we were able to share some findings that enrich our respective accounts of life aboard the Brisson. It was Jean-Luc, for example, who spotted that the ship’s cook, about whose cuisine Macintosh frequently complains in Travels, was the unfortunately named Monsieur Rat.

The next chapter of the book (as and when I finally get to it!) will deal with the authorship, reception, and reading of Macintosh’s Travels (1782). Over the last dozen-or-so years, I have amassed quite a lot of information about who owned copies of Macintosh’s book (see here and here, for example), but, as we know, owning is not the same as reading, and establishing who did the latter activity is always trickier. One category of readers that are, however, more readily identifiable are those who cited Macintosh’s text directly in their own written work, or who clearly drew on information contained within it. In this latter category we have people like the American geographer Jedidiah Morse, who used Macintosh’s account of South Africa’s Khoikhoi people in several of his textbooks, and the English novelist Phebe Gibbes, who borrowed from Macintosh’s account of India’s sacred rivers in her novel Hartly House, Calcutta (1789).

An early reader of Travels, who cited it directly in their own work, was the German philosopher-theologian, Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder read the English-language version of Travels in preparing his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-1791), specifically Part 1, Book 4, Chapter V (“Man Is Organized for the Most Delicate Health, yet at the Same Time for the Greatest Durability, and Consequently for His Dispersal across the Earth”), and Part 2, Book 6, Chapter III (“Organization of the Finely Formed Peoples of This Region”). Although a number of scholars have previously discussed Herder’s use of Macintosh’s Travels, a recently published translation of Ideen, rendered in English as Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, by Gregory Martin Moore, is the first to give any biographical information about him (drawn, I presume, from this blog).

The advent of a new translation of Ideen is very welcome as I start to think about the next chapter of my book and how best to contextualize the different uses to which Travels was put, both political and philosophical.