The next chapter of the book (as and when I finally get to it!) will deal with the authorship, reception, and reading of Macintosh’s Travels (1782). Over the last dozen-or-so years, I have amassed quite a lot of information about who owned copies of Macintosh’s book (see here and here, for example), but, as we know, owning is not the same as reading, and establishing who did the latter activity is always trickier. One category of readers that are, however, more readily identifiable are those who cited Macintosh’s text directly in their own written work, or who clearly drew on information contained within it. In this latter category we have people like the American geographer Jedidiah Morse, who used Macintosh’s account of South Africa’s Khoikhoi people in several of his textbooks, and the English novelist Phebe Gibbes, who borrowed from Macintosh’s account of India’s sacred rivers in her novel Hartly House, Calcutta (1789).

An early reader of Travels, who cited it directly in their own work, was the German philosopher-theologian, Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder read the English-language version of Travels in preparing his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-1791), specifically Part 1, Book 4, Chapter V (“Man Is Organized for the Most Delicate Health, yet at the Same Time for the Greatest Durability, and Consequently for His Dispersal across the Earth”), and Part 2, Book 6, Chapter III (“Organization of the Finely Formed Peoples of This Region”). Although a number of scholars have previously discussed Herder’s use of Macintosh’s Travels, a recently published translation of Ideen, rendered in English as Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, by Gregory Martin Moore, is the first to give any biographical information about him (drawn, I presume, from this blog).

The advent of a new translation of Ideen is very welcome as I start to think about the next chapter of my book and how best to contextualize the different uses to which Travels was put, both political and philosophical.