After an embarrassingly long time—a little more than 320 days—I have finished writing the first draft of another chapter. Although this is the shortest yet at 23,000 words, it has been the most challenging to write. It has also been the chapter that has felt most like detective work, as the nature of the supporting archival material has shifted to become more ephemeral—bills of sale, receipts, scribbled notes on scraps of paper—and less epistolary. The chapter has also, and more positively, been an education as I have engaged with a whole new set of secondary literatures in coming to grips with the complex and overlapping histories of the British and French presence in India.

The chapter follows Macintosh from his return from Dominica in the spring of 1776 to his eventual departure from France in January 1778 bound for India. This was an almost preposterously busy and complex period of Macintosh’s life, marking the end of his marriage, the development of his so-called “Eastern scheme”, his attempts to intervene in the American Revolution by proposing peace terms to Franklin in Paris, and his eventual identification as a presumed spy for the British against the French and Americans. In much the same way that this period marked a radical departure for Macintosh as he moved his focus, and his physical presence, from the West Indies to the East Indies, the wider intellectual framework of the book has had to pivot in the same way. From this point forward, the cast of characters, as well as the geographical and political contexts, are significantly different and it has been quite a steep learning curve to get a handle on the key secondary literature.

The momentary satisfaction at having completed another chapter is tempered, somewhat, by my back-of-envelope estimates of how much more there is still to do and quite how long this is all going to take. As I currently envisage the book, there are three more empirical chapters to come: one focusing on Macintosh’s experiences in India; one on the authorship, publication, reception, and translation of Travels (and other pamphlets he wrote); and one encompassing his experiences in France before and during the revolution, his period as a counterrevolutionary spy in Switzerland, and his eventual exile and death in Saxony. All that, plus an introduction and conclusion, of course.

I am fortunate to have a period of sabbatical leave between now and Christmas and hope to use it to complete as much of the next chapter as I can. The resumption of normal duties in January will inevitably mean progress slows again, and I think it is certain that I will miss my original submission deadline of September 2023. A related problem, that I don’t think I can solve now, is that the first draft of the book is likely to be significantly over my contracted word length. Although there will inevitably be significant savings to be made as I revise the book from its first to second drafts, this is a bigger problem that I am going to have to devolve to a future version of myself to deal with.

For now, my next task is a completely different one: to write a chapter on Ellen Churchill Semple for an edited collection. I haven’t worked on Semple for about 15 years, but am hoping a change of focus will be helpful and allow me to return to Macintosh later in October with a fresher perspective. We shall see…

For much of the summer I have been focused on, and writing about, Macintosh’s pivot from the West Indies in 1776 to the East Indies in 1778. The precise circumstances that led Macintosh to pursue his “Eastern scheme”—indeed, what that Eastern scheme actually was—have been a longstanding puzzle, but they have come gradually into view in the last few weeks and I have been able to enjoy the all-too-fleeting sensation of having cracked a stubborn code.

The chapter I am currently writing—the book’s fifth—will conclude at the point of Macintosh’s departure from Lorient, in France, en route to India in January 1778. Before getting to that point, however, I need to address Macintosh’s intelligence-gathering activities in France during the winter of 1777–78. Although it would be wrong to classify Macintosh as a spy during this period, since he was not formally employed in that capacity, his activities were very definitely considered to be spying by the French authorities and by the American congressional representatives living in Paris.

Macintosh was almost comically unsubtle in his efforts to gather political and military intelligence in France, and seems to have raised suspicions wherever he went. His lack of clandestine subtlety—and his unfamiliarity with what might be called spycraft—is an almost endearing quality in retrospect, but it had very real and very immediate consequences for him. The captain of the French ship that was due to carry Macintosh as far as Pondicherry, in India, was given a set of secret instructions by the authorities in Paris concerning Macintosh’s spying—instructions that eventually led to him being imprisoned at Isle de France (what is now Mauritius). This traumatic episode significantly delayed Macintosh’s arrival in India; all told, it took him almost 18 months to complete the journey, and he arrived in India jaded and dispirited.

The circumstances of his journey to India become significant (largely on account of who he met and the order in which he met them) for understanding how and why he performed a political volte-face on his arrival, from being a presumed supporter of Warren Hastings to a close ally of Hastings’ principal opponent, Philip Francis. It is to this story that the book turns in Chapter 6—a task that will consume my autumn.

I am in the extremely fortunate position to be on sabbatical during Term 1 of 2022/23, and hope to make as much headway as I can with this phase of the book. I know several institutions in the UK that have either decreased the frequency of research sabbaticals or eliminated them altogether, and it is difficult to imagine how it is possible to pursue large-scale research projects without the time and space offered by them (especially in the absence of external funding).