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.

It’s a source of wonderment and some embarrassment that this blog has reached its ninth birthday. On the one hand, I’m really glad to have kept it going for so long—it’s been helpful as a record of what I have done and still need to do, as a venue for the first rough draft of later writing, and, as a mechanism by which to reach an audience, it’s allowed me to connect with lots of interesting people. On the other hand, the blog’s birthday is a reminder of quite how (embarrassingly) long this project has been on the go—it was already a year old at least by the time I started the blog. I am, in that respect, now ten years or so into my work on Macintosh and it may yet be another three or four before the planned book finally materialises.

I have been very fortunate throughout the project not to have come under institutional pressure to prioritise other research projects that might offer a quicker return, even when—year after year—I failed to secure funding for this one. Given the ever-changing landscape of higher education and the growing emphasis on “generating income” (through applications for challenge-led research funding, for example), I cannot overstate how important it has been for this project that I have never (yet) been compelled to prioritise income generation over intellectual curiosity. I do worry, however, that the financial difficulties that the higher education sector is now experiencing as a consequence of the pandemic and lack of state support will mean that this sort of work—the slowest of slow scholarship—will become increasingly untenable and our individual priorities as academics will be recalibrated primarily along financial lines, rather than lines of intellectual inquiry.

Thanks to the support of the Leverhulme Trust, I have, however, made more progress in the last seven months than I have done in the previous half decade (even taking into account the impact of two lockdowns and months of home-schooling). The night-and-day difference that being relieved from teaching and administrative duties has made to my work on Macintosh is palpable, and it confirms something that I had often felt but had not quite been able to illustrate: that the time available for research (what is often pejoratively referred to as “unfunded research”) has, year on year, shrunk. When I was working with Charlie Withers and Bill Bell on writing Travels into Print, I remember being able typically to devote a day and a half each week of term to the task. Over the course of a term, I would have written a chapter. Viewed in retrospect, that situation seems barely believable. For at least the last five years or so, I have almost never been able to do any research or writing during term time at all and the precious remaining windows of the Easter and summer breaks have gradually, almost imperceptibly, been eroded by marking, meetings, and administrative tasks that seem never to let up. These windows are, of course, also the only time of the year when it is really possible to take annual leave. These observations are not in any sense new—every academic will be familiar with them—but the cumulative effect of changes to workload and its distribution across the academic year has really been brought home to me as a consequence of the fortunate position I now find myself in.

In early February I came to the unwelcome (although entirely obvious) conclusion that I was not going to be able to deal with all of Macintosh’s time in the Caribbean within a single chapter—Chapter 2—as I had originally planned. This month I have come to the equally obvious and equally unwelcome realisation that I am unlikely to be able to deal with it fully in two. Chapter 3, which I added to my writing plan last month, is expanding in all sorts of interesting ways as I continue to dig, read, and write and, although I am now at the half-way point in terms of acceptable word length, I am only just up to the winter of 1769–70 in the chronology, during which time the argument over French Catholic participation in Grenada’s government really comes to a head in the newspapers, printshops, taverns, and administrative offices of London. The figure of Thomas Hollis—whose fascinating and bizarre diary I read for the first time this month—looms large over these proceedings. While it has long been known that Hollis, a libertarian and fervent anti-Catholic, took an active interest in the debate over French Catholic participation in Grenada and Quebec, the full scale of his involvement hasn’t previously been written about, so it’s nice to be able to reveal this properly.

As it currently stands, I am hoping to be able to get to the financial crisis of 1772 (which was precipitated by Macintosh’s friend and financial supporter, Alexander Fordyce) by the end of Chapter 3, and to wrap up Macintosh’s Caribbean experiences in the first third of Chapter 4. I think this relative ballooning of chapters, in length and number, is a consequence partly of just how much there is to say and partly of the fact that there is next to no secondary literature on Macintosh that can do the job for me. Even then, I know that there is a huge amount of material from this period that I won’t be able to do more than hint at—material that I know will be of interest to historians of the Ceded Islands, but which really lies outside the core focus of the book. I keep having to remind myself that I can’t follow Robert Caro’s example and turn this into a five-volume epic.

The creeping sense of doubt and anxiety about ever being able to get to the end of this book has been allayed by three positive developments: 1) the reopening of schools on 8 March, which has allowed me to step back from my part-time role as home educator; 2) the prospect of the British Library and National Archives reopening in April, and 3) that the Leverhulme Trust has approved a request to extend the period of my fellowship to the end of the calendar year. This last piece of news is, frankly, an incredible privilege and something for which I am profoundly grateful. Having the chance to make up for time lost to home-schooling and the closure of libraries and archives is a huge relief, but I am acutely aware of what a privilege it is; so many of my colleagues (as well as my other half) whose research has been impacted in just the same way won’t have the same compensating opportunity.

Given recent experience, I am now rather reluctant to set out definitive goals for April (other than to take some proper time off during the school holidays), but I hope to be able to get back to the British Library to consult some manuscript material that I need in order to understand more fully the circumstances that led Macintosh to India in the first place, and to move Chapter 3 substantially closer to a conclusion.