After an embarrassingly long time—a little more than 320 days—I have finished writing the first draft of another chapter. Although this is the shortest yet at 23,000 words, it has been the most challenging to write. It has also been the chapter that has felt most like detective work, as the nature of the supporting archival material has shifted to become more ephemeral—bills of sale, receipts, scribbled notes on scraps of paper—and less epistolary. The chapter has also, and more positively, been an education as I have engaged with a whole new set of secondary literatures in coming to grips with the complex and overlapping histories of the British and French presence in India.

The chapter follows Macintosh from his return from Dominica in the spring of 1776 to his eventual departure from France in January 1778 bound for India. This was an almost preposterously busy and complex period of Macintosh’s life, marking the end of his marriage, the development of his so-called “Eastern scheme”, his attempts to intervene in the American Revolution by proposing peace terms to Franklin in Paris, and his eventual identification as a presumed spy for the British against the French and Americans. In much the same way that this period marked a radical departure for Macintosh as he moved his focus, and his physical presence, from the West Indies to the East Indies, the wider intellectual framework of the book has had to pivot in the same way. From this point forward, the cast of characters, as well as the geographical and political contexts, are significantly different and it has been quite a steep learning curve to get a handle on the key secondary literature.

The momentary satisfaction at having completed another chapter is tempered, somewhat, by my back-of-envelope estimates of how much more there is still to do and quite how long this is all going to take. As I currently envisage the book, there are three more empirical chapters to come: one focusing on Macintosh’s experiences in India; one on the authorship, publication, reception, and translation of Travels (and other pamphlets he wrote); and one encompassing his experiences in France before and during the revolution, his period as a counterrevolutionary spy in Switzerland, and his eventual exile and death in Thuringia. All that, plus an introduction and conclusion, of course.

I am fortunate to have a period of sabbatical leave between now and Christmas and hope to use it to complete as much of the next chapter as I can. The resumption of normal duties in January will inevitably mean progress slows again, and I think it is certain that I will miss my original submission deadline of September 2023. A related problem, that I don’t think I can solve now, is that the first draft of the book is likely to be significantly over my contracted word length. Although there will inevitably be significant savings to be made as I revise the book from its first to second drafts, this is a bigger problem that I am going to have to devolve to a future version of myself to deal with.

For now, my next task is a completely different one: to write a chapter on Ellen Churchill Semple for an edited collection. I haven’t worked on Semple for about 15 years, but am hoping a change of focus will be helpful and allow me to return to Macintosh later in October with a fresher perspective. We shall see…

For much of the summer I have been focused on, and writing about, Macintosh’s pivot from the West Indies in 1776 to the East Indies in 1778. The precise circumstances that led Macintosh to pursue his “Eastern scheme”—indeed, what that Eastern scheme actually was—have been a longstanding puzzle, but they have come gradually into view in the last few weeks and I have been able to enjoy the all-too-fleeting sensation of having cracked a stubborn code.

The chapter I am currently writing—the book’s fifth—will conclude at the point of Macintosh’s departure from Lorient, in France, en route to India in January 1778. Before getting to that point, however, I need to address Macintosh’s intelligence-gathering activities in France during the winter of 1777–78. Although it would be wrong to classify Macintosh as a spy during this period, since he was not formally employed in that capacity, his activities were very definitely considered to be spying by the French authorities and by the American congressional representatives living in Paris.

Macintosh was almost comically unsubtle in his efforts to gather political and military intelligence in France, and seems to have raised suspicions wherever he went. His lack of clandestine subtlety—and his unfamiliarity with what might be called spycraft—is an almost endearing quality in retrospect, but it had very real and very immediate consequences for him. The captain of the French ship that was due to carry Macintosh as far as Pondicherry, in India, was given a set of secret instructions by the authorities in Paris concerning Macintosh’s spying—instructions that eventually led to him being imprisoned at Isle de France (what is now Mauritius). This traumatic episode significantly delayed Macintosh’s arrival in India; all told, it took him almost 18 months to complete the journey, and he arrived in India jaded and dispirited.

The circumstances of his journey to India become significant (largely on account of who he met and the order in which he met them) for understanding how and why he performed a political volte-face on his arrival, from being a presumed supporter of Warren Hastings to a close ally of Hastings’ principal opponent, Philip Francis. It is to this story that the book turns in Chapter 6—a task that will consume my autumn.

I am in the extremely fortunate position to be on sabbatical during Term 1 of 2022/23, and hope to make as much headway as I can with this phase of the book. I know several institutions in the UK that have either decreased the frequency of research sabbaticals or eliminated them altogether, and it is difficult to imagine how it is possible to pursue large-scale research projects without the time and space offered by them (especially in the absence of external funding).

In April, a team of researches at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam published a fascinating report for the Dutch bank ABN AMRO on its historical links, by way of predecessor institutions, to slavery. The report—The slavery history of historical predecessors of ABN AMRO: An investigation into Hope & Co. and R. Mees & Zoonen—caused something of a stir on its publication, prompting media coverage and an apology from ABN AMRO.

The report addresses a significant gap in the literature. While it was well known that ABN AMRO’s predecessors—particularly Hope & Co.—were significantly invested in Caribbean slavery through the provision of plantation loans, among other activities, existing literature, like Marten Buist’s 1974 company history At spes non fracta, was insufficiently critical and failed to address properly the firm’s role in bankrolling the slave economy in the Caribbean.

The new report resolves this significant omission by placing these links at the centre of its focus. As a consequence of this attention, the report brings to the fore Macintosh’s 1770 plantation loan. From a narrative and explanatory perspective, the 1770 loan is something of a turning point in my study of Macintosh—it laid the foundation to his (doomed) partnership with William Pulteney, it cemented his friendship with Alexander Fordyce, and it became a complex financial burden which cast a long shadow over the next 15 or so years of Macintosh’s life.

My existing research on the loan drew from Macintosh’s own papers as well as notarial records in Amsterdam, but—due to the pandemic—I hadn’t been able to explore the issue from the side of Hope & Co. directly. The new report is, therefore, extremely helpful in allowing me to check the validity of what I have already written and to identify additional material in the Hope & Co. papers that might prove helpful by way of further context. Two of the reports researchers—Gerhard de Kok and Patrick van der Geest—have been kind enough to respond helpfully to my inquiries and with their help I should be able to cover all the archival bases of the 1770 loan.

Last summer Patrick also completed a master’s thesis examining the links between Hope & Co. and the 1772 financial crisis (“The banker’s banker: Hope & Co. and the credit crisis of 1772-1773“). Patrick has argued that rather than look solely to Alexander Fordyce to explain the crisis, we would be well placed to consider the economic consequences of Caribbean plantation loans, particularly those—like Macintosh’s—issued by Hope & Co. By coincidence, I was also contacted this week by another Dutch researcher—the historical geographer Taco Tichelaar—who is working on the 1772 crisis.

Last year I felt like I was ploughing something of a lonely (albeit important) furrow in writing about Macintosh’s loan, but this new report, alongside Patrick’s thesis, helps to provide a wider context in which to situate Macintosh and his significance.

The end of the exam term has allowed me to return, somewhat dazed and confused, to the book manuscript. Although I had tried my best to keep the research going during term time, it has been several months since I did any real writing and restarting the task has proved to be quite slow going. Inadvertently I had left the manuscript, just before Christmas, at a difficult-to-resolve juncture: the point in 1777 where Macintosh made the decision to embark on his “Eastern scheme” and to lay the groundwork for his journey to India. I didn’t know then, and am still now trying to understand, what the “Eastern scheme” actually involved (whether in Macintosh’s imagination or in reality) and until I can get that question resolved to my satisfaction, it is difficult to move the narrative forward.

I made progress of a sort this week in eliminating some of the possible explanations for the “Eastern scheme” and, in the process, cleared up some misidentifications of Macintosh that have appeared in the secondary literature. I have written before about the way Macintosh has been misrepresented or misunderstood as a consequence of confusion over or conflation with others who shared the same or a similar name. Such a situation occurred in relation to a “Mr Macintosh” (or “Mackintosh”) who, in late 1776, sailed for India in the Rippon with a series of letters for Warren Hastings from his agent in Britain, Lauchlin Macleane. I knew from evidence in Macintosh’s archive that he didn’t leave Europe for India until 1778, but I was not sure exactly how the two men had come to be conflated.

Perhaps the first conflation of Macintosh with “Mr Mackintosh” of the Rippon occurred in Henry Beveridge’s The Trial of Maharaja Nanda Kumar (1886), where he records that Macleane’s letters were taken out to Hastings “by Macintosh”. Although Beveridge identifies this Macintosh as the author of Travels, he acknowledges the fact that—according to Travels—its author “did not arrive in India till 1779”. “I still think,” he went on “that the Macintosh referred to by Hastings must be W. M., for [Joseph] Price calls the latter an intimate friend and fellow-labourer of Colonel Macleane”. In this respect, the confusion is perfectly understandable: what are the odds that Macleane would be working closely with two Macintoshes, both of whom travelled to India around about the same time?

Years later, and apparently independently, Lauchlin Maclean’s biographer—James N. M. Maclean—made the same error in conflation, noting that Macintosh had been “sent out to India as his [Macleane’s] special messenger to Hastings in November, 1776”. In this case, Macleane’s biographer had at least consulted the original correspondence, in which he would have seen Macleane’s note to Hastings concerning the bearer of his letters: “Mr. Macintosh promises all diligence and Dispatch with zeal & fidelity. He is recommended to your Protection” (13 November 1776; BL Add Ms 29317, f. 461r).

So, who was the Macintosh who sailed with the Rippon in November 1776? The best clue we have comes in a letter sent to Hastings from John Macpherson. In that letter (30 August 1778, BL Add MS 29141, f. 342v), Macpherson explained to Hastings that it had been him who had introduced “Mr. Mackintosh” to Macleane, “in order to place him in the line of a better fortune, than had attended the early part of his life”. As Macpherson explained, “In the success of that poor fellow, I am much interested”. It is possible that this was the same Mackintosh whom Laurence Sulivan had recommended to Hastings in 1773, when he wrote of a “Mr. William Mackintosh, who was in Bengal, & other parts of India, some Years, in the Shipping way; and now returns to follow the same Employ” (27 January 1773; BL Add MS 29133, f. 345r).

As the number of William Macintoshes continues to mount in my research, I can’t help but think that an interesting book could be written on their simultaneous, but different, experiences of the eighteenth-century world. What would it look like to write a history of that period from a prosopographical perspective, tracing the converging and diverging lives of those who shared a name? I shan’t allow my self to get distracted; one Macintosh is more than enough to keep me going!

By (yet further) coincidence, the Rippon was commanded on its eventual return voyage to Britain in 1780 by Captain John Blankett, to whom Macintosh would go on to send a dedicated copy of Travels upon its publication.

Monday marked the 10th anniversary of this blog (yikes!), and found me on a train to Rome. Although this was not a research trip, I was nevertheless following in the footsteps of William Macintosh, who visited the city in 1790 possibly for an audience with the Pope.

Like any dutiful tourist, I visited the Vatican and, in passing the entrance to the Apostolic Archive, did wonder idly if Macintosh’s presence might be recorded somewhere in there. It is, however, an avenue I have decided not to explore in the hope of actually being able to finish the book one day.

While in Rome, I received the very welcome news that an application I had made for a research sabbatical in the first term of 2022/23 had been approved. This is a huge relief, and a terrific privilege (since sabbaticals are awarded less routinely these days), and will give me a pretty clear run at the book from late June until Christmas.

At the end of my Leverhulme Fellowship in December, I set myself the challenge of keeping progress on the book moving along (no matter how incrementally) during term time, by blocking out time in my diary for the task. Somewhat to my surprise I have, so far, managed to stick to that plan and this is the fifth Friday in a row that I have been able to devote (wholly or partly) to Macintosh. In some ways this should not feel like such an achievement, but over the last five or so years I have found it increasingly difficult to do anything in term time other than frantically spin the plates of teaching and administration. Creating time for Macintosh has meant squeezing other tasks into the late evenings. It is doable, but it does not feel very sustainable!

My focus this year has fallen on trying to better understand and contextualise Macintosh’s geographical, economic, and political transition from Caribbean planter to traveller in India. His own archive is patchy during this period and I have had to cast the net much further to try to understand what was going on and how particular networks of friendship and patronage set Macintosh off in this new direction. His longstanding friendship with Lauchlin Macleane was particularly important in this respect and I have gone back to the work of his biographer, James N. L. Maclean, to better understand the relationship between Macintosh and Lauchlin Macleane. Macleane’s biographer is excellent on Macleane but, as I have written before, gets Macintosh completely wrong because he confused and conflated him with another individual with a similar name. Nevertheless, the work of James N. L. Maclean is really central to my understanding of this important period of transition in Macintosh’s life.

For a long time I have been meaning to read Maclean’s master’s thesis, which was a follow-up to his published biography of Lauchlin Macleane, and covers in detail the final four years of Lauchlin’s life, when he was working as agent for Warren Hastings. Not being able to find the time to get to Oxford to read the thesis in the Bodleian, I have spent the last couple of weeks tracking down Maclean’s literary executor to get permission to have an electronic copy of the thesis made. The task allowed me to play detective and, using the acknowledgements in Maclean’s PhD thesis, I was eventually able to identify and contact his literary executor, who has been kind enough to give permission for the master’s thesis to be reproduced (and eventually hosted on the Oxford University Research Archive).

Lauchlin Macleane was at the centre of East India Company politics in the 1760s and 1770s, and it was through him that Macintosh acquired the assistance or patronage of Company directors. Especially important in this respect was Laurence Sulivan, who was— at intervals—a director, Deputy Chairman, and Chairman of the Company. In letters to his son, Stephen, Sulivan writes interestingly about Macintosh’s motivations for going to India. Sulivan and his son tried to keep their correspondence secret by using a cypher: Macintosh was “Prime”, his friend John Townson was “Tracey”, and the Nabob of Arcot (Lacuhlin’s sometime employer) was “Job”. Sulivan’s letters to Stephen are held privately and I am very fortunate that their owner has agreed to let me consult them later this month. Without them I do not think I would be able to be definitive about what exactly set Macintosh on his course to India.

As ever, there is a lot still to do. Sometimes it feels like there is everything still to do, but writing this book is an attritional process and slowly, slowly, little by little, it will get done.

Today is the 300th (and final) working day of my Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. Although I can’t quite escape the thought that I have only just got going with the book, I find to my surprise that I have actually accumulated 108,450 words (including notes and bibliography). The nature of academia is, of course, always to lament the fact that more could have been done and that anything less than total completion of a project reflects some kind of failure. Anticipating that feeling, I began my Fellowship by creating a diary, in which I listed what I had done each day, whether that was reading, writing, editing, researching, or dealing with administrative tasks. I certainly found it a helpful routine in combatting existential crises over productivity!

I have progressed the book, roughly speaking, to the spring/summer of 1777—the period just before the narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa begins. Understanding Macintosh’s transition from Caribbean planter to traveller in India has proved taxing given the fragmentary, contradictory, and often deliberately clandestine nature of the surviving evidence, but I finally feel I am beginning to get to grips with it. Without question the most difficult part of the project is writing without the benefit of a foundation of existing scholarship—there is no empirically detailed but acritical Victorian hagiography of Macintosh for me to draw on, and every “fact” of Macintosh’s life has to be wrestled from primary sources. The consequence of this is that it’s difficult to know what twists and turns the narrative of his life will take next. It’s a little like driving towards a distant city in thick fog—the bright lights of the destination are just about visible, but you can’t see what’s coming next.

Having covered the first 40 years of Macintosh’s life, I have 36 to go. There is a vast amount of research and writing ahead, and still 21 months until the book needs to go to the publisher, but—in this moment at least—I feel hopeful that I’ll get there.

For much of the past year, as I have been writing Macintosh’s life, I have been thinking about his family: Ann, his wife, who nearly died following a miscarriage in Antigua in 1762; Betsey, the apple of her father’s eye, who eventually became estranged from him; Polly, strong-willed and independent, who gave Macintosh granddaughters and ever-expanding lines of descent in nineteenth-century France; and William, the boy who may have been adopted, who could never settle at school, and who seems to vanish from history after 1782. Macintosh’s relationship with Ann, in particular, has fascinated me, partly because it is so difficult to follow in the sources that remain. In the last month, however, I have finally been able to trace its end. Macintosh and Ann, long separated by the Atlantic, met in London in the spring of 1777 to formally agree the end of their relationship. Divorce was not really an option for a couple of their socio-economic standing and their separation was unaccompanied by a profusion of legal documents; it is recorded only in fragments.

As Macintosh and Ann called time on their relationship, one of the mementoes of their failed marriage briefly entered the historical record. On 13 June 1777 a gold watch with a personalised dial, on which the numerals had been substituted with the twelve letters A-N-N-M-A-C-I-N-T-O-S-H, was stolen from the shop of the Fenchurch Street jeweller, Thomas Hunter, by “Two Women and a Labourer”. This was not the first such theft from Hunter’s shop, but it seems to have gone unsolved in this case. I have found myself thinking a great deal about that watch in recent days. Was it a gift from Ann to Macintosh, or the other way round? Was it in Hunter’s shop to be cleaned or had it been sold—a relic of a relationship whose time had passed?

In addition to musing about Macintosh’s family life, I have spent much of November attempting to understand the sequence of events that led him from Dominica in 1776 to his departure from France to India in 1778. This has turned out to be a much more complex and interesting period of transition than I had imagined and, as I have noted before, my digging has brought to the surface some unexpected correspondence concerning Macintosh’s supposed spying activities. Although it is difficult to be certain, it seems as though Macintosh’s own political curiosity/meddling was misconstrued as something altogether more covert and sinister, both by the British and by the Americans and French. It is certainly the case that Macintosh tried to position himself as a useful conduit of information, relaying political intelligence to the British government by way of the ambassador in Paris. Macintosh had a longstanding connection with one of Britain’s most prominent intelligence agents in Paris, Paul Wentworth, and was known to the spy handler William Eden. I have found no evidence, however, that Macintosh was ever paid for any of this activity. As ever, there is more digging to do!

As I look ahead to December, and the end of my research leave, I am beginning to think about how best to sustain my writing when I return to normal duties in the New Year. With a fair wind, I think—by the time I down tools for Christmas—I will be able to get the book to the point of Macintosh’s departure for India in 1778. My (hopelessly naïve) plan is then to try to keep one morning free each week to continue work on the book, with the aim of completing this chapter by the start of the Easter break. Doubtless this plan will be derailed by the first marking deadline, but for now I am choosing to feel optimistic that the future version of myself will somehow be more focused, productive, and disciplined than the 2021 equivalent has been.

On 17 September 1776, the British diplomat Sir Joseph Yorke wrote to Lord Suffolk to convey his suspicions about an individual who seemed to be collecting information in the Netherlands relevant to the rebellious Americans:

I have learnt that Macintosh is certainly in correspondence with America! His original business in Holland was to study the minute parts of the constitution of the Republic, and to transmit the model to the trans-Atlantic legislators. I make no doubt he has ingrafted other information upon that original commission, and does as much mischief as ever he can: still, however, Your Excellency may look upon Dumas, as, properly speaking, the Congress agent.

York to Lord Suffolk, 17/09/1776

A year later, on 31 December 1777, James Moylan—a pro-Revolution commercial agent in France—wrote from L’Orient to the diplomat Arthur Lee on the subject of a suspicious character:

Mackintosh has not been here Since my arrival, but I learn there were grounds for our Suspicions of him

Moylan to Lee, 31/12/1777

Could Macintosh and Mackintosh be the same individual? If so, could this be my Macintosh? Suspected by the British as a spy for the Americans, yet suspected by the Americans in turn? Right now, I have no idea; all I have is circumstantial evidence:

1. Macintosh was often in the Hague and Amsterdam in 1776;
2. Correspondence places him in L’Orient at the time Moylan was writing (indeed on the very same day);
3. He took an active interest in the American Revolutionary War and advocated a compromise, but fundamentally sided with the British.

Did Macintosh’s irrepressible political curiosity lead both parties simply to mistake his intentions? Are there sufficient grounds here for speculation?

I am—after 115 days of writing and c. 99,000 words (including notes and references)—at the very end of Macintosh’s time in the Caribbean. It was, for him, such an eventful, complicated, and consequential period in his life that I never thought I’d be able to encompass it. There are, of course, a thousand stories in the archive that still remain to be told about that period, but since I don’t have the luxury of two or more volumes for this book, I will have to leave those for others to uncover. There are, equally, stories I’ve now written that will need to be cut or entirely discarded when I return to the job of editing and pruning this section of the book. It is, by any standards, too long, particularly with three big empirical chapters still to come (not to mention the introduction and the conclusion).

Moving, as I will do shortly, to the next part of the book—which concerns Macintosh’s journey to India—feels like starting an entirely new work. The context is different, the literature is different, the places and people are different. It took me much of the last year to really feel like I’d got to grips with the Caribbean (at least enough to contextualise Macintosh’s experiences) and now I’m starting that process again from scratch. It’s exciting, but also intimidating. I know, too, that I’ll have to do it all again for the final part of the book that deals with Macintosh’s time in France and his experiences of the Revolution. Again, thrilling and anxiety-inducing in equal measure.

This month’s blog post comes a little earlier than usual as the school half-term holiday (aka pandemic circuit breaker) starts tomorrow and I will consequently be downing tools until 1 November. I’ll then have six or seven weeks to push the India chapter forward, the first fortnight of which will likely be devoted to background reading and research. I’m particularly looking forward to puzzling out the sequence of events that led Macintosh to India. I suspect, but am not sure, that it was the result of a plan hatched with his long-time friend Lauchlin Macleane, but one ultimately scuppered by Macleane’s death. At this stage, who knows? I look forward to finding out.