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.

Having not attended the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference since 2018, it was a pleasure to make a belated return there last week, and to enjoy the company of old friends, to be energised by the exchange of ideas, and to talk (if only for 15 minutes) to an audience about Macintosh. I was lucky enough to participate in a fascinating pair of sessions—”Surveying the Field: Caribbean Histories and Geographies”—organised by Jo Norcup and David Lambert. My own paper, “Testimonial injustice and the authority of Black voices in eighteenth-century Grenada,” used Mariana Fricker’s concept of ‘testimonial injustice’ to consider the intersecting social and legal frameworks that functioned to subtract credibility from, or entirely to invalidate, the testimony of Black people, both enslaved and free.

Later in the week I was discussant in a session I co-organised with Diarmid Finnegan on geography and biography, which contained a series of excellent and thought-provoking papers that addressed a range of conceptual and methodological questions around the writing of biography, particularly in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Although the conference made for a busy and rather exhausting few days, it was a welcome change to the rather cloistered experience of book writing that has typified my summers in recent years.

Almost everyone I met at the conference was keen to know how the book was going, and there were many solicitous and well-meaning inquiries about quite why it was taking so long and whether my perfectionism might be partly to blame. These comments were tempered, however, by a common view that slow scholarship matters in an era of scholarly overproduction and might even be a (quiet) form of resistance to academia’s neoliberal ideologies. As readers of this blog will know, I have long wrestled with these questions and concerns so to have them vocalised by others was not a cause for further anxiety but simply a reminder that my friends and colleagues know me rather well.

I did wonder, however, whether these questions would look different in a different disciplinary context, such as history, where the writing of scholarly monographs is more commonplace and where one’s career is measured out in a series of decade-long “book projects”, rather than a more rapid and frequent stream of journal articles. There are, of course, larger trans-disciplinary processes at work—such as the REF—that have the effect of deprioritising the academic monograph as a form of scholarly output. A decade ago Robert Mayhew noted that “the audit culture of U.K. academic life increasingly positions the writing of a monograph as outré, an indulgence, or both.” Arguably this positioning has only calcified in the intervening time, particularly so when the next REF will place less emphasis on research outputs and more on the wider “research culture” in which they are composed. Indeed, as Matthew Gandy has recently argued,

The academic monograph, a cornerstone of academic achievement in many disciplines, will be under further pressure with the move away from individual scholarship in REF 2029. This marks a contrast with REF 2021 where the wider funding differential between 3* and 4* publications, along with greater flexibility in submissions per person, may have contributed to a modest increase in the number of research monographs submitted in geography, sociology, and cognate disciplines. Many academics have spent recent years preparing book manuscripts in anticipation of a similar evaluative framework for the next REF: now this has all changed, with the likelihood that books will be perceived as ‘out of step’ with the new emphasis on multi-authored publications under a science-based model. Furthermore, if we compare the years of intellectual labour that go into the production of a double-weighted monograph, which might constitute just 1% of the overall research evaluation profile for a medium-sized department, we find that an equivalent degree of effort devoted to the preparation of documentation required for ‘research culture’ would involve many years if not decades of academic labour.

Concerning as these broader processes undoubtedly are, they are there to be challenged and (as in the case of the unworkable and now abandoned open-access requirement for monographs) potentially changed. For now, though, and despite my internal battle with perfectionism, onwards, onwards!

I am fortunate to have a tolerant family—one that supports and indulges my interest in Macintosh, even when that interest intrudes a little on our summer holidays. This week they were, once again, kind enough to let me take them on a small detour, this time to visit the site in Nice where two of Macintosh’s granddaughters lived and died: what was in their time the Place Cassini, but is now the Place de l’Île de Beauté.

I presume, but do not know for sure, that the widowed sisters—Mathilde and Anna—lived together, or as neighbours, in the Palais Astraudo, an elegant colonnaded apartment block built on the north side of the place in the mid nineteenth century, next to the Eglise Notre Dame du Port. The sisters, who had begun their lives as émigrés in England, died only a few years apart in the 1870s in aristocratic comfort. Mathilde (by then a baroness) died in July 1872, the day before her 80th birthday, and Anna (by then a countesses) followed in April 1879, aged 84.

As I have mentioned before, I have no intention of following the lives of Macintosh’s grandchildren across nineteenth-century France in my book, but it matters to me, for reasons that I cannot fully articulate, to know something of their stories—their beginnings and their endings, and the lives they led that are now largely forgotten.

It is not unusual for scholars to become obsessed in their quest to understand their subject. Often, at least in my experience, this obsession is enhanced when the task of pinning down a basic detail—like a date, a place, or a name—turns out to be more challenging than was expected. This was certainly true for the late nineteenth-century chronicler of British India, Henry E. Busteed. His particular monomania centred, for a time, on identifying the Dutch vessel on which Catherine Grand, the future wife of Charles Talleyrand, had travelled from the Cape of Good Hope in the company of a young East India Company servant, Thomas Lewin.

Busteed went to extraordinary lengths (as described above) to locate a passenger list that might identify the ship on which Grand and Lewin travelled. Despite extensive searching, he was never able to resolve the mystery. Indeed, to this day—as far as I can tell—the identity of the Dutch ship has remained unresolved. A recent (and engagingly written) historical novel-cum-biography based on Grand’s life, The Mistress from Chandernagore: The Child Bride who Achieved Eminence in Napoleon’s Empire (2022), fills the gap with an invented name, the Zeeuw or Zeeland. Although I do not share Busteed’s level of obsession, I do take some satisfaction in disappearing down archival rabbit holes in order to be able to fully flesh out a footnote. Both Grand and Lewin are part of the sprawling cast of characters that occupy my book, having formed the context for much of Macintosh’s activities in London and Paris in 1781 and 1782. As I have noted before, Macintosh took a direct role in establishing Grand as an independent woman in Paris, and his friendship with Lewin was, for a time, consequential and financially beneficial.

In an attempt to complete Busteed’s unfinished task, I was able to turn today to GLOBALISE, an incredible new project that is transcribing the digitised archives of the Dutch East India Company. Although the project is not yet complete, it is possible to search automated transcriptions of the digitised sources using a temporary search platform. What we can see from a quick search is that Lewin (and a fellow Briton, Michael Topping) were granted permission to travel on the Vrouwe Anthoinetta Koenrardina, which left the Cape of Good Hope on 31 January 1781, eventually reaching Cadiz on 27 April. Although I have not been able to find specific mention of Grand’s name, it may be because she joined the ship earlier, in India, and was not, therefore, mentioned in dispatches between the Cape and Amsterdam. That’s another mystery to solve; these footnotes won’t write themselves!

As May draws to a close, and as the flood of exam and coursework marking begins to subside, my thoughts are turning back to writing. Despite my best efforts to keep the book moving along this term, I have—as always seems to be the case—been overtaken by short-term deadlines and time-sensitive tasks. This week I did, however, manage to carve out a morning for work at the London Metropolitan Archives, where I consulted, among other things, the register of Mary (Polly) Macintosh’s marriage.

As I have noted before, Polly’s 1791 marriage to her French patrician husband, Alexander, took place under rather unusual circumstances. The pair were émigrés, having escaped France during the Revolution, and were married in the Protestant Chapel in Ostend. I was keen to consult the register to check who had witnessed the ceremony, and was able to confirm that Polly’s mother, Ann, was in attendance, but not, seemingly, Macintosh himself. The ceremony was presided over by the Chapel’s minister, the Reverend John Trevor. Although both Polly and Alexander were Catholic, this was not an obstacle to them being married in a Protestant church; indeed the stipulations of the 1753 Marriage Act meant that doing so was necessary to ensure the legal validity of the marriage. Banns having been read to the Chapel’s congregation in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, the couple were married on 19 September 1791. More than a decade later, the pair would be married again—this time in a civil ceremony in post-Revolutionary France, and with Macintosh in attendance.

Despite the uncertainty that the Revolution precipitated for Polly and Alexander, they wasted no time in starting a family. Within a month, Polly was pregnant with the couple’s first daughter, Augusta-Elisabeth-Mathilde.

Today (somewhat to my disbelief) marks the 12th anniversary of this blog. Although this project has always been an exercise in slow scholarship, it was never my expectation when I began that I would still be blogging a dozen years later. On one hand, this is a very positive consequence on the endlessly rich and fascinating story that my research is uncovering; on the other hand, it is a reflection of the fact that my progress, especially in the last year, has been slower than I would have liked.

While slow scholarship has always represented a small and symbolic (but also privileged) act of resistance to dominant modes of fast-paced academic production, it does feel even more difficult to sustain in the context of the present financial and ideological crisis in UK higher education, where barely a day passes without news of new rounds of redundancies. As one academic commentator recently put it, “it’s essentially amazing that anyone in UK universities—bar a couple of institutions—is producing any research at the moment…I genuinely wonder how anyone is doing anything”.

Once again, the anniversary of this blog gives me the opportunity to reaffirm my commitment to slow scholarship and to seeing this project through to its conclusion, day by day, word by word.