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—Jacques Pierre Brissot, Edmund Burke, Aaron Burr, Olaudah Equiano, Charles Fox, Philip Francis, Catherine Grand, Warren Hastings, Johann Gottfried Herder, Thomas Jefferson, Jacques Necker, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, 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, and the British Academy for the award of the Donald Winch Fund Fellowship which is to run from September 2025 to August 2026.
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]
Presentations relating to the project
“Prisoner, émigré, spy: revolution and counterrevolution in the life of William Macintosh.” Paper presented at ‘Displacement and the French Revolution’, a one-day workshop at UCL, London, 29 May 2025.
“The archive in the armoire: rediscovering the global lives of William Macintosh.” Inaugural lecture as Professor of Historical Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, 20 May 2025.
“Testimonial injustice and the authority of Black voices in eighteenth-century Grenada.” Paper presented at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), London, 27–30 August 2024.
“Textual mobility and cultural hybridity: following the translations of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782).” Paper presented online at ‘Moving Forward: A Concept-Based Conversation on Mobility and the Humanities’, a two-day workshop hosted by the Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche Geografiche e dell’Antichità, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy, 13–14 May 2021.
“The forgotten lives of William Macintosh in the Age of Revolution: from Caribbean planter to traveller in India; from spy in France to exile in Germany.” Address to the Queen Mary Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar series, Queen Mary Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23 October 2018.
“Ideas in motion: bodies, books, and the circulation of knowledge.” Paper presented at ‘Géographies en Mouvements’, a two-day workshop organised by the Programme Doctoral de Géographie of the Conférence Universitaire de Suisse Occidentale, Montezillon, Switzerland 6–7 February 2017.
“Fragments, mother lodes, and the gaps that remain: recuperating the forgotten geographies of William Macintosh.” Address to the Cultural and Historical Geography Research Group seminar series, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, 7 December 2016.
“Fragments, mother lodes, and the gaps that remain: recuperating the forgotten geographies of William Macintosh.” Address to the Human Geography Research Group seminar series, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, 30 March 2016.
“William Macintosh’s Travels: colonial mobility and the circulation of knowledge.” Paper presented at the 16th International Conference of Historical Geographers, London, 5–10 July 2015.
“‘Consistent neither with candour nor truth’: negotiating authorship and authority in William Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782).” Paper presented at the 111th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago, 21–25 April 2015.
“Circulating seditious knowledge: the ‘daring absurdities, studied misrepresentations, and abominable falsehoods’ of William Macintosh.” Address to the Human Geography seminar series, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, 24 January 2012.
“‘[D]aring absurdities, studied misrepresentations, and abominable falsehoods’: the geographical writings of William Macintosh (1738–c. 1809).” Paper presented at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), London, 31 August–2 September 2011.