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…