William Macintosh was an eighteenth-century Scottish merchant, Caribbean plantation owner, world traveller, and controversial author of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782). He was a product of empire, but also sought to shape and influence Britain’s imperial project through persuasion and publication. This blog is a record of my efforts to recover Macintosh from the shadows and to throw new light onto his life and work in the production of a monograph for McGill-Queen’s University Press exploring his world and words.
Macintosh’s life was one lived through the Republic of Letters and during the Age of Revolution. The list of those who met, read, or corresponded with Macintosh—Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville, Jacques Pierre Brissot, Edmund Burke, Aaron Burr, Olaudah Equiano, Charles Fox, Philip Francis, Catherine Grand, Warren Hastings, Johann Gottfried Herder, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, William Pitt the Younger, and George Washington, among many others—signals to his significance to the intellectual and political life of the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
I am Professor of Historical Geography in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Financial support
In supporting this project, I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Research Fellowship that ran from September 2020 to December 2021.
Project team
I am fortunate to have had the assistance of four undergraduate students, and one postgraduate student, from the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London in the transcription of archival material:
Rhys Gazeres de Baradieux, Department of Geography Placement Research Assistant, June 2017.
Jaz Bigden, MSc Global Futures: Culture and Creativity Work-Based Learning Research Assistant, February–June 2021.
Ophelia King, Department of Geography Placement Research Assistant, June 2016.
Lauren Muir, Department of Geography Placement Research Assistant, June 2016.
Samuel Thatcher, Department of Geography Placement Research Assistant, June 2017.
Since April 2020, my father, Alex Keighren, has kindly lent his assistance in the transcription of Macintosh’s correspondence.
Throughout the project, I have benefited from assistance of various individuals in translating non-English-language sources: Professor Hugh Clout, Dr Elizabeth Haines, Dr Emily Hayes, Mr Dominique Lussier, and Dr Céline Tschirhart have helped with French material; Dr Dean Bond and Dr Luise Fischer with German material; Mr Thomas Gerhardsen Moine with Danish material; and Mr Hidde Wams with Dutch and Flemish material.
Publications emerging from the project
Keighren, Innes M. “The confiscated library of William Macintosh in the Bibliothèque municipale d’Avignon”. The Library: The Transactions of The Bibliographical Society 22, no. 2 (2021): 197–216. [PDF]
Keighren, Innes M. “A contested vision of empire: anonymity, authority, and mobility in the reception of William Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782)”. In Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century, edited by David Lambert and Peter Merriman, 50–68. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.
Keighren, Innes M. “From the archive: on the trail of William Macintosh”. Historical Geography Research Group Newsletter, winter (2017–18): 4–5. [PDF]
Keighren, Innes M. “Circulating seditious knowledge: the ‘daring absurdities, studied misrepresentations, and abominable falsehoods’ of William Macintosh”. In Mobilities of knowledge, edited by Heike Jöns, Peter Meusburger, and Michael Heffernan, 67–83. Cham: Springer, 2017. [PDF]