If the problem with hagiography is that it uproots people from history, holding them aloft as solitary stars from the vast constellation of influences that forged them, then the same is true of vilification. A monster, like a saint, is someone made radically unique by extracting them from their social, intellectual, and political context. Both lack an intimate life – for villainy or genius is a lonely pursuit – and their ideas are ennobled or debased by being utterly dissimilar from anybody else’s of their era.

John Macarthur, whether remembered as “the ingenious Mr MacA”, “the father of Australian fleece” or most recently, by writer Kate Grenville, as a “colonial monster”, a bully, or “the most difficult man on the planet at that time” has swung wildly between both extremes.

For this reason, Alan Atkinson’s superb biography, tellingly entitled Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm is a welcome contribution to Australian history, written in a manner not simply accessible, but poetic and abidingly pleasurable, for the scholar or intelligent reader alike.

Atkinson explains that the story of John must also be a story of his wife, Elizabeth, which is in turn a story of a marriage, a family, and friends; of the intimate ties that made imperial expansion possible. Far from uprooting the Macarthurs, Atkinson grounds them in an archival “forest of voices”, taking the reader on a gentle stroll to inspect the environment – the soil, air, and climate – in which their ambitions took seed and the imprint of Enlightenment philosophy on their habits of mind, their structures of feeling and John’s political interventions.

We see how their fortunes depended not simply on genius or skill, but on the vicissitudes of markets in Britain and the violence of dispossession in Australia. This is a history that is embedded and embodied – we hear “tear-ragged” voices when family members die, we feel the pangs of gout, the sharp stabs of madness and we sit suspended with the Macarthurs in imperial webs of commerce, curiosity, coercion, and care that glimmered in the twilight of the 18th century, spanning the surface of the European world.

Elizabeth and John focuses on the period from the 1790s until the 1830s, but its intellectual framing is drawn from scholarship on 18th-century Enlightenment thought. To this end, we follow the story of the Macarthurs through a set of familiar episodes – John’s service in the military, their arrival in Sydney in the 1790s, their experiments in sheep farming, the (so-called) rum rebellion, and John’s political and commercial interventions in the 1820s and ’30s – but rather than being a simple story of colonial ambition or burgeoning democracy, it is, surprisingly, a tale of the influence of European philosophical and scientific thought on the early colony.

For instance, Macarthur’s research into viticulture in 1815-16 sees him and his sons citing Rousseau on the streets of Geneva, attending public lectures and learning to think of wine production as an integrated agro-economy: further proof of the French philosophers’ “insistence on a unified web of life″⁣. The Macarthurs’ thinking bears instruction for agriculturalists wrestling with climate change today.

Atkinson cares equally about the history of ideas as he does about the Macarthurs, and these two preoccupations produce a book delightfully dizzying in breadth and scope. This is a history that soars and swoops between mammoth global processes and exquisitely personal sentiments.