{"id":54,"date":"2012-06-01T16:13:53","date_gmt":"2012-06-01T15:13:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=54"},"modified":"2015-03-31T14:47:48","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T13:47:48","slug":"macintosh-a-man-of-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=54","title":{"rendered":"Macintosh: “a man of mystery”"},"content":{"rendered":"

After five weeks of marking\u2014and in the gaps left by my fits-and-starts writing on\u00a0Travels into Print<\/em>\u00a0(it is coming along, albeit slowly)\u2014I have returned briefly to Macintosh’s trail. In terms of his\u00a0appearance\u00a0in the scholarly record, it would be fair to say that Macintosh occupies interstitial\u00a0space\u2014more often to be found in footnotes than in the main body of the text.<\/p>\n

It is, I suppose, Macintosh’s anonymity that I find so curious and compelling. Given that his book was read by British politicians, French revolutionaries, German humanists, and at least two U.S. Presidents, and that it helped to fundamentally alter the government of British India, his\u00a0erasure\u00a0from the historical record is both noteworthy and confounding. It is unsurprising, therefore, that one author described him as\u00a0“a man of mystery”\u2014a shadowy figure on the periphery\u00a0of mainstream historiography (Fraser 1915, 18).<\/p>\n

Macintosh’s most recent appearance in a scholarly footnote occurs in Emma Rothschild’s excellent The inner lives of empires: an eighteenth-century history<\/em>\u00a0(2011).\u00a0Rothschild’s book<\/a> is a prosopography, tracing the history of one generation of a Scottish family\u2014the Johnstones\u2014across and through Britain’s eighteenth-century empire. One of the Johnstones, William (1729\u20131805), owned and managed plantations in the\u00a0Caribbean\u00a0and did so (it seems) in partnership with Macintosh. According to one letter from William Johnstone, Macintosh “ran away to the island of Madeira” leaving “large debts ” (Rothschild 2011, 356).<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Inner Lives of Empire (2011).<\/p><\/div>\n

Although only referred to in The inner life of empires\u00a0<\/em>as “a man called Macintosh”, I have had an email exchange with\u00a0Rothschild and we are both fairly confident that her<\/em> Macintosh is also my<\/em> Macintosh (Rothschild 2011, 356).\u00a0Johnstone’s papers at the Huntington Library<\/a> and the\u00a0West Indies papers<\/a> at the University of\u00a0Bristol’s\u00a0Special Collections\u00a0department\u00a0should, at some stage, help to fill in the gaps surrounding Macintosh’s time in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n

Fraser, Leon. \u201cEnglish opinion of the American constitution and government (1783\u20131798).\u201d Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1915.<\/p>\n

Rothschild, Emma. The inner life of empires: an eighteenth-century history<\/em>. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After five weeks of marking\u2014and in the gaps left by my fits-and-starts writing on\u00a0Travels into Print\u00a0(it is coming along, albeit slowly)\u2014I have returned briefly to Macintosh’s trail. In terms of his\u00a0appearance\u00a0in the scholarly record, it would be fair to say that Macintosh occupies interstitial\u00a0space\u2014more often to be found in footnotes than in the main body […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}