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.