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.

Although (or perhaps because) I am still deeply immersed in writing about Macintosh’s experiences in the Caribbean during the 1770s, I cannot resist looking forward to the material that lies ahead. My recent visits to the British Library have allowed me to begin filling in the fascinating details of Macintosh’s counterrevolutionary activities in Switzerland and the levels of secrecy that were required in order to communicate transnationally during the French Revolution.

Alongside the use of sympathetic ink, Macintosh recommended in a memorandum to Charles Jenkinson, then President of the Board of Trade, that a common cypher (above) be used to facilitate safe communication and “to secure agents against surprise”. This period in Macintosh’s life—mysterious by design—is one that I am very much looking forward to tackling and untangling.

For a number of years I have been in discussion with a kind and encouraging editor at a university press over my planned book. His patience has been exceeded only by my slowness in formalising my ideas in a book proposal. In this respect, I have been approaching things in a rather back-to-front way; my previous practice—such as it is—has always been to tackle the proposal first before starting to write the book itself (or, at least, before having written very much of it). My slowness—or, more properly, my reluctance in this case—stems from three concerns: first, my uncertainty over the likely length of the final book and its number of chapters; second, the difficulty I have in estimating how long the book will actually take me to finish; and third, my seeming inability to identify a title for the book that I am happy with.

While I have a well-developed sense of the book’s overall structure in terms of chronology, key episodes, and themes, the fact that I am researching as I write, means that, quite naturally, I find the book’s focus shifting and its scope expanding. Where my previous books have been driven by their conceptual arguments, this book is somewhat different. It is driven, at the same time, by an act of archival recovery and an attempt to tell a particular story of empire and politics in the second half of the eighteen century through the perspective of one individual’s life. That Macintosh’s life was so varied, in terms both of historical incident and geographical experience, is what makes his story so compelling. At the same time, it is also what makes it challenging to decide how the facts of his life should be connected so as to make more than an anecdotal/empirical contribution.

While the academic “so what?” of studying Macintosh is, in some senses, easily answered in terms of what it reveals about the making and mobility of ideas of empire, about authority and influence over political decision making, about the transnational circulation of ideas, and the mechanisms and consequences of forgetting, identifying one of those as the most significant—and the one on which to hang the book’s wider conceptual contribution—is more challenging.

That Macintosh’s trajectory through life connected the geographically disparate locations of the Highlands of Scotland in the shadow of the Jacobite rising, the colonial Caribbean in the decades around the Seven Years’ War, the Early American Republic, British India, France on the eve of Revolution, counterrevolutionary Switzerland, and late-Enlightenment Saxony makes it possible to tell a comparatively transnational story of the eighteenth century, but it does also make it difficult to know how best to pitch the book—in terms of its title—in such a way as to advertise its relevance to area/period specialists. How will scholars working in these areas know that the book has something to say to them?

Almost six years ago, I thought I had hit on the right title, The forgotten radical: William Macintosh and the transnational circulation of seditious print in the Age of Revolution, but I no longer think that does quite the right job, partly because the term “Forgotten Radical” has since then been used for a collection of Peter Maurin’s essays, partly because I have come to see that Macintosh actually vacillated between radical and conformist political stances, and partly because the focus of the book has moved to encompass more than just Macintosh’s book and its reception.

While Macintosh’s historiographical anonymity is a rationale for my project, it also presents a problem: because he has no name recognition, the book’s title must do something to indicate to the prospective reader who he was and/or why he mattered. Who Macintosh was varied, of course, considerably across his lifetime; he was variously a merchant, planter, traveller, author, political commentator, counterrevolutionary agitator, spy, prisoner, émigré, and forgotten historical actor. Which of these lives best captures his interest and relevance? Macintosh’s plurality makes it difficult to decide.

These questions could, of course, continue to swirl around my mind indefinitely, but I have committed to submitting a book proposal by the middle of September, so I will keep my fingers crossed that inspiration strikes soon.

I have been fortunate to be able take advantage of the short window of time between the relaxing of lockdown regulations and the apparent arrival of the pandemic’s third wave in the UK to return home to Scotland. In addition to undertaking archival work at the National Library and the National Records of Scotland, where I was tracking down references to Macintosh’s father in the papers of the Sutherland estate, I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon in the garden of Deirdre Grieve, William Macintosh’s great, great, great, great grandniece, whom I met first in 2014. Along with her son, Dorian, Deirdre has been an enthusiastic source of support and genealogical information since I began this project, and it was a real pleasure to bring her up to date on my work. Having spent so much time working on Macintosh in comparative isolation, being able to talk through my ideas and findings was a real confidence boost and a reminder of the fact that I am writing for a real audience (of at least two).

In the course of our chat, I was reminded that Deirdre’s own copy of Macintosh’s book contains a rather amusing marginal comment—”Blockhead”—which was clearly prompted by Macintosh’s discussion of the possibility that the earth might contain vast subsurface oceans, replete with “huge and stupendous” animals, à la Jules Verne.