Tracing an Archive: The Mackintosh Archive in Familial and Colonial Context

This article focuses on the genealogy of the Mackintosh archive, showing how subjects are interpellated through archival networks that span imperial and metropolitan sites, linking people, ideas, knowledge and material resources. By tracing the Mackintosh archive across generations of family members embedded in British imperial society, it shows how archives call forth an individual—Sir James Mackintosh—as a symbol and a site of the interconnections between the patriarchal family, the male-dominated state and the production of cultural imaginaries of belonging. Tracing this archive, it argues that the ‘society’ to which James Mackintosh belonged is both reflected in, and constituted through, the letters and journals that comprise his archive. In form and content, they provide the material evidence for the interconnectedness of social, familial, intellectual and political lives. They function both as fantasies and representations of belonging to a social network—a community—and a constitutive part of the consolidation of that network. The letters and diaries that comprise the Mackintosh Archive bear witness to the formation of a literary elite at the turn of the nineteenth century and the mobility of that elite around European-imperial space. Thus, the Mackintosh Archive illustrates the point, made by an increasing number of imperial and global historians, that ideas and identities were forged through inter-connections across space.