I am fortunate to have a tolerant family—one that supports and indulges my interest in Macintosh, even when that interest intrudes a little on our summer holidays. This week they were, once again, kind enough to let me take them on a small detour, this time to visit the site in Nice where two of Macintosh’s granddaughters lived and died: what was in their time the Place Cassini, but is now the Place de l’Île de Beauté.

I presume, but do not know for sure, that the widowed sisters—Mathilde and Anna—lived together, or as neighbours, in the Palais Astraudo, an elegant colonnaded apartment block built on the north side of the place in the mid nineteenth century, next to the Eglise Notre Dame du Port. The sisters, who had begun their lives as émigrés in England, died only a few years apart in the 1870s in aristocratic comfort. Mathilde (by then a baroness) died in July 1872, the day before her 80th birthday, and Anna (by then a countesses) followed in April 1879, aged 84.

As I have mentioned before, I have no intention of following the lives of Macintosh’s grandchildren across nineteenth-century France in my book, but it matters to me, for reasons that I cannot fully articulate, to know something of their stories—their beginnings and their endings, and the lives they led that are now largely forgotten.

It is not unusual for scholars to become obsessed in their quest to understand their subject. Often, at least in my experience, this obsession is enhanced when the task of pinning down a basic detail—like a date, a place, or a name—turns out to be more challenging than was expected. This was certainly true for the late nineteenth-century chronicler of British India, Henry E. Busteed. His particular monomania centred, for a time, on identifying the Dutch vessel on which Catherine Grand, the future wife of Charles Talleyrand, had travelled from the Cape of Good Hope in the company of a young East India Company servant, Thomas Lewin.

Busteed went to extraordinary lengths (as described above) to locate a passenger list that might identify the ship on which Grand and Lewin travelled. Despite extensive searching, he was never able to resolve the mystery. Indeed, to this day—as far as I can tell—the identity of the Dutch ship has remained unresolved. A recent (and engagingly written) historical novel-cum-biography based on Grand’s life, The Mistress from Chandernagore: The Child Bride who Achieved Eminence in Napoleon’s Empire (2022), fills the gap with an invented name, the Zeeuw or Zeeland. Although I do not share Busteed’s level of obsession, I do take some satisfaction in disappearing down archival rabbit holes in order to be able to fully flesh out a footnote. Both Grand and Lewin are part of the sprawling cast of characters that occupy my book, having formed the context for much of Macintosh’s activities in London and Paris in 1781 and 1782. As I have noted before, Macintosh took a direct role in establishing Grand as an independent woman in Paris, and his friendship with Lewin was, for a time, consequential and financially beneficial.

In an attempt to complete Busteed’s unfinished task, I was able to turn today to GLOBALISE, an incredible new project that is transcribing the digitised archives of the Dutch East India Company. Although the project is not yet complete, it is possible to search automated transcriptions of the digitised sources using a temporary search platform. What we can see from a quick search is that Lewin (and a fellow Briton, Michael Topping) were granted permission to travel on the Vrouwe Anthoinetta Koenrardina, which left the Cape of Good Hope on 31 January 1781, eventually reaching Cadiz on 27 April. Although I have not been able to find specific mention of Grand’s name, it may be because she joined the ship earlier, in India, and was not, therefore, mentioned in dispatches between the Cape and Amsterdam. That’s another mystery to solve; these footnotes won’t write themselves!

As May draws to a close, and as the flood of exam and coursework marking begins to subside, my thoughts are turning back to writing. Despite my best efforts to keep the book moving along this term, I have—as always seems to be the case—been overtaken by short-term deadlines and time-sensitive tasks. This week I did, however, manage to carve out a morning for work at the London Metropolitan Archives, where I consulted, among other things, the register of Mary (Polly) Macintosh’s marriage.

As I have noted before, Polly’s 1791 marriage to her French patrician husband, Alexander, took place under rather unusual circumstances. The pair were émigrés, having escaped France during the Revolution, and were married in the Protestant Chapel in Ostend. I was keen to consult the register to check who had witnessed the ceremony, and was able to confirm that Polly’s mother, Ann, was in attendance, but not, seemingly, Macintosh himself. The ceremony was presided over by the Chapel’s minister, the Reverend John Trevor. Although both Polly and Alexander were Catholic, this was not an obstacle to them being married in a Protestant church; indeed the stipulations of the 1753 Marriage Act meant that doing so was necessary to ensure the legal validity of the marriage. Banns having been read to the Chapel’s congregation in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, the couple were married on 19 September 1791. More than a decade later, the pair would be married again—this time in a civil ceremony in post-Revolutionary France, and with Macintosh in attendance.

Despite the uncertainty that the Revolution precipitated for Polly and Alexander, they wasted no time in starting a family. Within a month, Polly was pregnant with the couple’s first daughter, Augusta-Elisabeth-Mathilde.

Today (somewhat to my disbelief) marks the 12th anniversary of this blog. Although this project has always been an exercise in slow scholarship, it was never my expectation when I began that I would still be blogging a dozen years later. On one hand, this is a very positive consequence on the endlessly rich and fascinating story that my research is uncovering; on the other hand, it is a reflection of the fact that my progress, especially in the last year, has been slower than I would have liked.

While slow scholarship has always represented a small and symbolic (but also privileged) act of resistance to dominant modes of fast-paced academic production, it does feel even more difficult to sustain in the context of the present financial and ideological crisis in UK higher education, where barely a day passes without news of new rounds of redundancies. As one academic commentator recently put it, “it’s essentially amazing that anyone in UK universities—bar a couple of institutions—is producing any research at the moment…I genuinely wonder how anyone is doing anything”.

Once again, the anniversary of this blog gives me the opportunity to reaffirm my commitment to slow scholarship and to seeing this project through to its conclusion, day by day, word by word.

The unequal destiny of Macintosh’s children—Betsey, Polly, and William—is something on which I often reflect, particularly so when the snatches of time I have for research are more suited to chasing down genealogical sources than doing concentrated writing. The tragic suicide of William in 1784 contrasts, for example, with the frustratingly mysterious terminus of Betsey, whom I have failed to trace beyond a final reference to her (as the married Elizabeth Bromley) in June 1806. A rich, and in a genealogical sense, complete story exists only for Polly, the youngest of the three.

Polly lived a long life and died, well in to her 80s, as the Comtesse de Colleville, the well-to-do matriarch of a large French family. None of this was predestined, and the elegant townhouse she occupied at the time of her death, on the rue des Réservoirs in Versailles, would have seemed a world away from the plantation house in Grenada where she spent her first months of life. The route between these two biographical-cum-geographical points in her life was not straightforward, however, and she weathered significant disruptions, not least the French Revolution which turned her and her husband into émigrés. Subsequently abandoned by her husband, Polly raised four girls—Macintosh’s only grandchildren that I have been able to identify—who, for the most part, lived equally long lives and forged advantageous marriages.

Those who have worked with French genealogical sources will be familiar with their incredible abundance, particularly so for the nineteenth century, and the fact that many have been indexed and digitised in ways that make searching and consultation relatively straightforward. I have spent some time in these online archives recently, piecing together the key sources—records of births, marriages, and deaths—that map out the life course of Polly’s children. There is, of course, a whole story to be written (à la Emma Rothschild’s An Infinite History) about Macintosh’s descendants and their lives across nineteenth-century France—a story that is, equally obviously, beyond the scope of my book. That said, it has been important to me to have a sense of what happened next, particularly so for Polly, following her father’s death in 1813, and being able to hint at that familial trajectory will be an appropriate way to round off my book, when the time comes.

When Polly—Madame Maria Macintosh, Comtesse de Colleville as she then was—died in November 1855, she was mourned by an extended patrician family of diplomats and high-ranking army officers. Her funeral was held, “a 11 heures précises du matin,” at the splendid seventeenth-century Église Notre-Dame de Versailles. She was buried, later that day, in the Cimetière Notre-Dame de Versailles. Three of her four daughters outlived her and traversed most of the nineteenth century. The last, Anne-Esther-Isaure, died, like her mother, in Versailles, in 1884—a full century after her tragic uncle William had taken his own life.

Polly left behind not only daughters, but many grandchildren. It would be quite easy to get lost in following their lives and destinies (perhaps I’ll save that for a retirement project), not least because doing so holds in prospect the possibility of finding living descendants in modern-day France. At least one of Polly’s grandchildren gained widespread fame in their own time and has garnered biographical attention subsequently: Georges-Fernand Dunot de Saint-Maclou, founder of the Bureau des Constatations Médicales at Lourdes, and son of Polly’s daughter Augusta-Elizabeth-Matilda. Often referred to as the “Doctor of the Grotto”, Dunot’s work at Lourdes focused on establishing the medical basis to the cures claimed by pilgrims. His life has been the subject of an absolute doorstop of a book by Andrea Brustolon, Georges Fernand Dunot De Saint-Maclou: Il dottore della grotta (2014). At almost 800 pages in length, and a kilo in weight, Brustolon’s book certainly give me something to aim for with mine!

I learned this week that I (along with 92% of other applicants) had been unsuccessful in applying for a particular research fellowship. The scarcity of such fellowships, and the high demand for them, means that applications always represent the very longest of longshots. I was disappointed nevertheless, knowing that the fellowship would have provided the time and focus I need to finish the book. For now, though, I keep on keeping on.

This week also brought more positive things. On Monday I attended a presentation by Margaret Schotte, delivered as part of the Prize Papers Lunch Talks series. Margaret’s paper, “Sailing with the Prince de Conti: Recovering individual stories in the Prize Papers”, told a very interesting story about the seizure of the French ship Prince de Conti during the Seven Years’ War. During her talk, Margaret mentioned a resource that I was totally unaware of: digitised crew and passenger lists from French East India Company ships. These lists were primarily digitised by a volunteer organisation, the Association des Amis du Service Historique de la Défense à Lorient. As soon as Margaret’s talk was finished, I immediately delved into the collection and was able to find Macintosh (albeit transcribed as (“MACINTORF”) in the passenger list for the Brisson, along with his fellow Briton, the Reverend Thomas Yate.

Macintosh (or “MACINTORF”) in the Rôle du Brisson (1778-1780).

These listings are really useful since they give a much fuller picture of the cast of characters within whom Macintosh interacted on the Brisson, some of whom he refers to in Travels by rank or role rather than by name. Being able to connect the two—between text and archive—is potentially very beneficial.

Shortly after Margaret’s talk I discovered, for the fist time, a really interesting podcast, Drafting the Past, that focuses on the art and craft of historical writing. Each episode focuses on the work of one academic and invites them to reflect on the approach they take, practical and conceptual, to writing history. The most recent episode features an interview with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, discussing his new book, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It. Since listening to this episode I have been working my way slowly back through earlier episodes, taking inspiration from the stories of all those who have carved out the time and maintained the drive to get their books over the line.

I have written before about the press speculation that followed the shocking and widely publicised suicide of Macintosh’s son, William, in December 1784. Amid the various causes on which the London press speculated, one that had escaped my attention until this week was the possibility that William had been spurned by a lover. According to a report in the London Chronicle (30 December 1784–1 January 1785), William had—on his return from India, where he had acquired a sum of money—”entered into all the fashionable vices of the times”. “During his race of folly,” the Chronicle continued, William “formed a connexion with a Miss Robertson, of the Cyprian order, who no sooner found his circumstances were in the wane, than she bid him adieu for one who was more likely to support her in style”. “This infidelity of his mistress,” the Chronicle concluded, “in great measure led him to commit this rash act; young and inexperienced, he had set his affections upon her, and foolishly concluded he should have a continuance of pleasure and happiness in the arms of a prostitute”.

Framed here as a gendered morality tale, William’s sad fate is seen to be the combined outcome of naivety and deception. It is a story, in the Chronicle‘s telling, that seems to combine the characteristic elements of a morality play: temptation, in the form of alcohol, gambling, and the company of women; a fall, in the form of debt and betrayal; and redemption, of a sort, in the form of a final “fatal act [designed] to save himself from shame, remorse, and upbraidings”. Accurate or not, it was an account that sought to give some logic to what otherwise seemed a tragic and illogical event.

The Miss Robertson, whom the Chronicle casts as the femme fatale in its account, would doubtless have been familiar to contemporary readers of Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, a catalogue or directory of London’s female sex workers, published annually in the second half of the eighteenth century. Given its ephemeral nature, not all editions of the List have survived, although new copies continue to come to light. Neither the 1784 nor 1785 editions of the List exist in publicly accessible collections, so I may never be able to learn more about the Miss Robertson on whom William “fixed his love, and lavished his fortune”. At the time of his death, the 1785 edition of the List was readying for publication on New Year’s day. Indeed, the day before William was buried at St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, the Morning Herald carried an advertisement for the new List, copies of which could be had at no. 9 Little Bridges Street, a two-minute walk away on the other side of the piazza.

After a gap of five-or-so months, I had the opportunity last week to return to the book. Although I had anticipated that a busy term of new teaching in the autumn would eat up a lot of time—and had done my best to leave the book in a state that would make returning to it easier—it was still a daunting prospect to get back into the swing of things, and to pick up the various threads of the story. In the end, it was not as bad as I had feared and I was able to get the narrative moving again. I am hopeful, but perhaps not optimistic, that I will be able to keep a day, or half a day, aside each week to maintain the momentum of research and writing. In preparation for this, I have enacted all the usual best-practice advice, having blocked out my calendar and cleared my diary for the days in question, but know from experience that it is hard to guard writing time in the face of short-term priorities, like marking, which tend to win out when time is limited.

My focus remains, for the foreseeable future, on Macintosh’s time in Calcutta. This was a pivotal moment in his life when he forged a political friendship with Philip Francis and first articulated the criticisms of Warren Hastings that would characterised his later travel narrative. Those political alliances and oppositions developed against a more practical context: how was Macintosh going to find his way back to Britain and what was he going to do to make sure that his journey to India had not been a waste of time? Macintosh’s archive reveals that these logistical-cum-financial concerns were ever present during the closing months of 1779. His first idea, and certainly his most outlandish, was to raise funds to buy a ship (of 600 to 800 tons), fill it with saleable goods (muslin and silk, coffee and saltpetre), and sail it under Danish flag to France. It was a plan that ultimately went nowhere, but illustrates how keen Macintosh was to make good on the failure of his earlier experiment in importing goods from France to India.

When that idea fell from view, Macintosh pivoted his ambitions and secured permission from the Bengal Council to return to Britain, via Suez, on an East India Company packet, the Swallow (shown above in triple portrait). The Swallow was an attractive option; it was to be captained by Stephen Macleane, the cousin of Macintosh’s friend and patron Lauchlin Macleane; it would give Macintosh the opportunity to visit Cairo, which he ached to do; and it would provide him with a welcome source of income, since he had been promised 2,000 rupees to take charge of Company dispatches during the overland portion of the journey. Like the Danish scheme, however, Macintosh’s plan to return on the Swallow proved ill-fated. Stephen Macleane died unexpectedly and there were repeated delays in finding someone to replace him. Hastings asked Macintosh’s emerging nemesis, Joseph Price, to take on the role, but Price declined; he did not like the look of the Swallow‘s crew and would only considered the role if he were to be given a military commission and thereby carry the necessary authority to discipline the crew effectively. Although Macintosh subsequently intervened, writing to the Council to recommend the Bengal mariner William Tomkins for the role, it ultimately came to naught. Macintosh was eventually forced to take a longer and less-profitable journey home on the Ganges, via the Cape of Good Hope.

As much as Macintosh’s anxieties over his route home are small beer when set against his evolution, during the same period, as a political thinker and commentator on Indian affairs, they provide an important context to his developing views. Macintosh came to see the delays over the Swallow as deliberately calculated to frustrate his ambitions, and laid blame for that at the door of Hastings. His opposition to Hastings was not simply an abstract intellectual exercise emerging from an evaluation of claims and counterclaims over his abilities, but emerged also from increasingly tense personal interactions in Calcutta during the last months of 1779.

For now, though, it feels good to be back on the trail, however briefly or intermittently, and I look forward ultimately to seeing Macintosh safely back to Britain where the next chapter of the book will follow the authorship, publication, and reception of his best-selling travel narrative.

An ever-present challenge in a long-term project like writing a book is how best to sustain momentum when other priorities demand your time and attention. Although I approached the new academic year this September in the hopeful expectation that I might be able to set aside some regular time for writing the book, this failed to materialise (quelle surprise). As is often the case, the academic term brought unexpected challenges that—on top of the task of writing a significant number of new lectures—meant that the book has been in a state of hibernation, and will likely remain so until the new year.

Frustrating and a little anxiety-inducing as this lack of progress is, I did manage to carve out space this term to apply for a research fellowship that, if awarded, would give me the opportunity to bring the book to its conclusion. At the same time, I feel more optimistic that I will be able to dedicate regular days to book writing from January, largely because I am teaching existing material and won’t be on the energy-sapping treadmill of producing new lectures each week. I do hope this won’t be a case of famous last words!

2024 will also see a new editor taking over responsibility for my book at McGill-Queen’s University Press. My current editor, Richard Baggaley (who has been a supportive and enthusiastic advocate for the book since we first discussed it in 2019) will be moving on to a freelance role. Although changes of acquisitions editor for an academic book are par for the course, especially when the writing of one extends over many years(!), I am aware that I will need to re-pitch the book to whomever inherits Richard’s portfolio. This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course; being prompted to reconsider the case for one’s book can only be to its ultimate benefit.

Memorial to Joseph Price (1726–1796) in the Priory Church of St Mary the Virgin in Monmouth

To mark the end of another summer of work on my book, I recently made a pilgrimage of sorts to the Priory Church in Monmouth to see the memorial to Joseph Price, the East India Company captain and prolific pamphleteer with whom Macintosh clashed in the London press in 1781 and 1782 over the reputation of Warren Hastings.

Price was deeply significant in shaping Macintosh’s experience in (and of) India and his published criticisms—including the allegation that Macintosh was mixed race—have shaped the subsequent historiography in important, albeit distorted, ways. The relationship between Price and Macintosh, one based on claim and counter claim, does make it difficult to separate truth from fiction in writing about Macintosh’s time in India, but it’s also a useful reminder about the partiality of all historical sources and the necessity of verifying and triangulating truth claims.

As the new academic year comes into view, and I prepare to deliver new teaching, progress on the book will inevitably slow, settling into the term-time rhythm of writing snatched in half-day chunks here and there. Although the fits-and-starts approach to writing that the academic calendar (or my endurance) demands, having time to pause and reflect is helpful, not just frustrating, giving me an opportunity to look up from the empirical detail to the wider story and the book’s trajectory as a whole. Onward, ever onward.