At the end of my Leverhulme Fellowship in December, I set myself the challenge of keeping progress on the book moving along (no matter how incrementally) during term time, by blocking out time in my diary for the task. Somewhat to my surprise I have, so far, managed to stick to that plan and this is the fifth Friday in a row that I have been able to devote (wholly or partly) to Macintosh. In some ways this should not feel like such an achievement, but over the last five or so years I have found it increasingly difficult to do anything in term time other than frantically spin the plates of teaching and administration. Creating time for Macintosh has meant squeezing other tasks into the late evenings. It is doable, but it does not feel very sustainable!

My focus this year has fallen on trying to better understand and contextualise Macintosh’s geographical, economic, and political transition from Caribbean planter to traveller in India. His own archive is patchy during this period and I have had to cast the net much further to try to understand what was going on and how particular networks of friendship and patronage set Macintosh off in this new direction. His longstanding friendship with Lauchlin Macleane was particularly important in this respect and I have gone back to the work of his biographer, James N. L. Maclean, to better understand the relationship between Macintosh and Lauchlin Macleane. Macleane’s biographer is excellent on Macleane but, as I have written before, gets Macintosh completely wrong because he confused and conflated him with another individual with a similar name. Nevertheless, the work of James N. L. Maclean is really central to my understanding of this important period of transition in Macintosh’s life.

For a long time I have been meaning to read Maclean’s master’s thesis, which was a follow-up to his published biography of Lauchlin Macleane, and covers in detail the final four years of Lauchlin’s life, when he was working as agent for Warren Hastings. Not being able to find the time to get to Oxford to read the thesis in the Bodleian, I have spent the last couple of weeks tracking down Maclean’s literary executor to get permission to have an electronic copy of the thesis made. The task allowed me to play detective and, using the acknowledgements in Maclean’s PhD thesis, I was eventually able to identify and contact his literary executor, who has been kind enough to give permission for the master’s thesis to be reproduced (and eventually hosted on the Oxford University Research Archive).

Lauchlin Macleane was at the centre of East India Company politics in the 1760s and 1770s, and it was through him that Macintosh acquired the assistance or patronage of Company directors. Especially important in this respect was Laurence Sulivan, who was— at intervals—a director, Deputy Chairman, and Chairman of the Company. In letters to his son, Stephen, Sulivan writes interestingly about Macintosh’s motivations for going to India. Sulivan and his son tried to keep their correspondence secret by using a cypher: Macintosh was “Prime”, his friend John Townson was “Tracey”, and the Nabob of Arcot (Lacuhlin’s sometime employer) was “Job”. Sulivan’s letters to Stephen are held privately and I am very fortunate that their owner has agreed to let me consult them later this month. Without them I do not think I would be able to be definitive about what exactly set Macintosh on his course to India.

As ever, there is a lot still to do. Sometimes it feels like there is everything still to do, but writing this book is an attritional process and slowly, slowly, little by little, it will get done.