Innes M. Keighren
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 provisionally entitled The forgotten radical: William Macintosh and the transnational circulation of seditious print in the Age of Revolution.
I am a historical geographer with research interests in geography’s disciplinary and discursive histories, in book history, and in the history of science. My work has examined, among other topics, the history of polar science and exploration; the origins of environmentalist thought in geography; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel writing; the communication of scientific knowledge in text, image, and speech; the popular and scholarly reception of scientific knowledge; and the circulation and diffusion of ideas.
28 November 2023
The gingko grove outside the Queen’s Building at Royal Holloway, University of London. An ever-present challenge in a long-term project like writing a book is how best to sustain...
4 September 2023
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...
The “Musquitto fleet” and “Mac, the Historian”
17 July 2023
The long and ignominious personal conflict between Philip Francis and Warren Hastings is well known to historians of the East India Company, but the parallel proxy war that played out...
The uncertain terminus of John Whitehill
8 June 2023
Of all the friendships that William Macintosh cultivated on his arrival in India, that with the sometime governor of Madras, John Whitehill, was perhaps the most unlikely. An archetypal...