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.