Although I find it difficult to believe, I have now completed 10 months of my Leverhulme Research Fellowship. For all that those 10 months have been disrupted by home schooling, archive and library closures, and the general restrictions of lockdown, they have, nevertheless, been totally transformative for my work on Macintosh. Being able, as I have, to devote all or part of 202 working days to the task—including 79 spent writing—has been the greatest privilege. I now have about 66,000 words of the book (including notes) and a greater sense of confidence that it will be possible, one day, actually to complete it.
During June I was able to begin work on the book’s third empirical chapter (of six or seven; we’ll see how it goes), which deals with Macintosh’s final years in the Caribbean and his unexpected transition from planter to world traveller. This was a period of rapid ascendancy for Macintosh, which began in 1770 with the negotiation of a loan from the Dutch bank Hope & Co. and the purchase of plantations in Tobago and Dominica, but also of precipitous decline, largely as a consequence of the aftereffects of the 1772 financial crisis, which had been precipitated by Macintosh’s friend and trustee of his Dutch mortgage, Alexander Fordyce. This is also the period during which Macintosh met Olaudah Equiano and during which he reflected about the differential status of free and enslaved black bodies. It was also the period of his final efforts to challenge the political status quo in Grenada and to unseat Robert Melvill from his role as Governor. I have found Macintosh’s time in the Caribbean endlessly fascinating, and I will be sad to leave it behind when I finish this chapter, but, equally, I am keen to move the narrative along and to follow Macintosh to India.
This month, Jaz Bigden (aka Team Macintosh 4.0) completed his master’s placement with me, having compiled two very useful indices of Macintosh’s letterbooks. Since the first of these letterbooks is not in strict chronological order, having an index is extremely useful in following the threads and sequence of correspondence. If Macintosh’s letters are ever digitised, these indices will also prove extremely helpful as an organisational framework. Elsewhere in the Macintosh Expanded Universe, my dad (aka Team Macintosh 3.0) has kindly continued his beyond-the-call-of-duty transcription efforts, in attending to material from the British Library relating to Macintosh’s counterrevolutionary activities in the 1790s.
June also saw the publication—in The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society—of my catalogue of Macintosh’s private library. This was, in lots of ways, a labour of love and I’m delighted to see it out in the world.