I am now fairly close to having finished writing three very long chapters covering Macintosh’s quarter-century in the Caribbean. This was an eventful and tumultuous time in his life (as well as in the politics of empire) and it has been a wonderful, although occasionally overwhelming, challenge to reconstruct that period from its archival remains. Not for the first time, have I silently (and sometimes not so silently) cursed the fact that no one has done this before me and ache for the reassurance that an earlier biography of Macintosh would provide. As often as I fear I might never understand some event in his life, however, I am surprised that the answer is there, somewhere, among the thousands of archival photographs sitting on my computer.

I have, I suspect, about two more weeks’ work to bring this part of the book to a close and to follow Macintosh from the Caribbean to India. I will be sad, in many ways, to leave the Caribbean behind, just at the point I feel like I am beginning to understand it (and its enormous secondary literature), but I am looking forward to the new challenge of coming to terms with the complex politics of British India in the 1770s and ’80s. The three Caribbean chapters will, I think, each need to be split in two to prevent them from being too unwieldy, but that is a job for another day in another year.

One thing the Caribbean section of the book has done is to make me reflect about the moral questions raised by the act of recovering Macintosh’s life from historical obscurity. What, one might ask, is the moral justification for writing 165,000 words on the life of an individual who owned and traded slaves? Although I try, wherever I can in the book, to make enslaved people – their words and actions – visible, it is but a drop in the ocean. Such questions are thrown into even sharper relief when one thinks about how the legacy of those Macintosh worked alongside, like his co-partner William Pulteney, are now considered.

When, in 1773, Macintosh was undergoing treatment in Bath for an unshakeable bout of bilious fever under the care of the celebrity doctor Philip de la Cour, he would have seen the final stages of construction of Pulteney Bridge, a gateway and a prelude to the eastward expansion of the city in the 1780s into the Pulteney family’s 600-acre Bathwick estate. The bridge would have served then as a visual reminder of the enormous gulf in social and political standing separating Macintosh from Pulteney, whose copartnership was then on its last legs. By the end of the 1780s, Pulteney Bridge was joined by Great Pulteney Street, a long and wide avenue of Georgian townhouses, extending a quarter a a mile westwards to what is now the Holburne Museum.

2020 saw calls for Great Pulteney Street to be renamed on account of William Pulteney’s connections (partly through Macintosh) to the slave trade. One suggestion was to rename it after the abolitionist campaigner William Wilberforce, who lived at no. 36 in the early 1800s. The fact is that if Macintosh had not escaped from the historical record, we might now be having a similar public debate about how his legacy should be addressed. There is, of course, no Great Macintosh Street for us to contend with, but the possibility of one is not just theoretical; Macintosh’s brother, George—wealthier but less historically and politically significant than William—is commemorated in McIntosh Street in Glasgow.

What, I must ask myself, do I need to do to prevent the book becoming a printed equivalent of Great Macintosh Street? Part of this will come, I think, from the book’s criticality in attempting to think through the processes and consequences of its own making. It also comes from addressing the fact that Macintosh’s archive is also an archive of slavery and one that prompts me to address Saidiya Hartman’s question “How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?”

In many ways writing a book with a biographical focus should be easy: you simply follow an individual from birth to death and write about what comes in between; the structure being dictated by the inevitable forward progression of time. In reality, of course, it is much more difficult than that—it is necessary to identify the narrative threads and conceptual arguments that run across the book and the life, to identify the events that best exemplify those arguments and provide those threads, and to think about each chapter as a step in developing the book’s wider intellectual contribution. The task is complicated further when, as in the case of Macintosh, you don’t know for sure—until you begin the iterative process of researching and writing—where following a life will take you next. For all of those reasons, I never quite felt ready to write a book proposal. While it is normal (and perhaps best) practice to write the proposal before writing the book, or very much of the book, I was reluctant to do so when so much was still unknown and felt uncertain as a result. Nevertheless, as a result of the gentle and encouraging prompting of my prospective editor and of a colleague during my annual review, I finally bit the bullet and put together the proposal.

The act of writing a proposal is the act of making (and defending) decisions about content, structure, and focus. Persuading others about a book’s purpose, contribution, and value is, in many respects, a helpful way of boosting one’s own confidence about a book and it has certainly given me a greater sense of the role I would like to see this one play. At the same time, making solid plans about the organisation of a book—in terms of structure and production timeline—is also a useful disciplining mechanism; it imposes a deadline and a clear set of parameters within which to keep the book focussed. I won’t pretend it was an easy proposal to write (it wasn’t), but I am glad to have done it. I am even more pleased that the proposal was positively received by McGill-Queen’s University Press, who are kindly in the process of drawing up an advance contract.

The proposal locks in (more or less) an eight-chapter structure: six empirical chapters plus the (still fairly empirical) introduction and conclusion. At the moment, I have written two and a half of those (rather long) empirical chapters and will aim to write one and a half more during the remainder of my fellowship. Mindful that my writing will inevitably slow when I return to normal duties in January, I have proposed a September 2023 deadline (with two empirical chapters to be written in 2022 and the introduction and conclusion in 2023). This is, I remind myself several times a day, a marathon and not a sprint.