#darien scheme

[racefortheironthrone]

Haven't the same sovereign didn't really united the kingdoms under a single government with the House of Orange or House of Hanover so wondering if Scotland's bankruptcy over the Darien expedition matter more to uniting the kingdoms than the accession in England of the House of Stuart?

Ok, I think I get what you're driving at.

So the important thing is that a personal union is not the same thing as a real union or a political union, and so on and so forth. In a personal union, you have two (or more) separate and independent governments that just happen to share the same monarch.

When it comes to Scotland's political union with England, I would agree that the failed Darien scheme (in which Scotland sank about 20% of all the money in the country into setting up a colony in Panama, only for 80% of the colonists to die in the first year) played a significant role in getting the Scottish Parliament to agree to the Act of Union in 1707.

But it wasn't the only factor. (After all, there had been periodic efforts to pass an Act of Union for a hundred years, under both the Stuarts and the House of Orange, which failed due to religious politics.) So what were some of the factors?

Royal succession was a major issue. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Jacobite Rising of 1689, the governments of both England and Scotland realized that the question of succession was a major national security issue for both countries. However, it was not clear that England and Scotland would remain in personal union after the reign of Queen Anne, largely due to disagreement over which particular Protestant monarch would be chosen that were actually a proxy for economic conflicts...

Trade was a major motivation. When the Scottish Parliament passed the Act of Security of 1704, which mandated that Scotland's choice of the next monarch would have to be different from that of England unless England agreed to free trade with Scotland, the English Parliament used the Alien Act of 1705 to ban exports from Scotland to England (which was around 50% of Scotland's total international trade at the time) in order to strong-arm the Scottish government into negotiating over union.

Naval policy was a major motivation. As a small independent kingdom, Scotland's merchant marine fleet got hit pretty badly by privateers during the many European wars of the late 17th/early 18th century. Union would mean protection for Scottish merchant ships from the increasingly powerful English (soon to be British) navy.

[bantarleton]

Also, they currently have the chest from the Darien Project on display in the National Museum of Scotland. 

The Darien Scheme was Scotland’s concerted effort to found a colony in the 1690s, an effort that went so disastrously wrong is bankrupt the country and helped open the door to the British Union of 1707. 

[fionamccall]

Embroidery of the foolish Darien Scheme of 1698, which set out to establish a colony in the Darien Gap on the Isthmus of Panama in the late 1690s. It failed, and bankrupted Scotland. There is still no road across the Darien Gap.

Great Tapestry of Scotland, Gallashiels, Scotland

[historic-mysteries]

How The Darien Scheme Changed the History of Scotland's Independence

William Paterson dreamt to establish a Scottish colony and international trade post at Darien, Panama. Did the Darien scheme cause Scotland's lost freedom?

[peashooter85]

A Scottish Colony in Central America --- The Darien Scheme

In the Age of Exploration and subsequent colonization of the America's, the Kingdom of Scotland played a very small role.  However in the 1690's, a wealthy Scottish banker named William Paterson had plans to change all that.  Paterson proposed the founding of a Scottish colony on the Isthmus of Panama, known to them as the Isthmus of Darien.  At that strategic location the Scots could control trade between North and South America as well as overland trade from the Caribbean to the Pacific.  Paterson believed that the colony could provide immeasurable riches to Scotland, a small economy with little wealth and few exports.  

Using his influence as founder of the Bank of England, Paterson helped found the Bank of Scotland, and attracted investments from all over Scotland.  Scottish nobles were so enthusiastic about the project that they invested £400,000, which was almost 1/4th of all the cash wealth in Scotland.  The Company of Scotland was formed, and by 1698 an expedition of 1,200 people had founded the colony of New Edinburgh, which consisted of a simple fort and a number of huts.

The Scottish colonists at Darien were so out of place they were like fishes without water.  Attempts at agriculture failed miserably as the colonists could not comprehend that farming techniques successful in Scotland would not work in the jungles of Panama.  They also lacked fresh water as the colony had been built far away from any rivers, wells, or aquifers. The Scots had brought a number of trinkets to trade with the natives.  However these natives, who had clashed with the Spanish for over a century, did not want their Scottish junk, they wanted the Scots gone.  With shortages of food and potable water, the Scots soon fell to malnutrition and tropical disease.  Especially deadly were the terrible outbreaks of malaria, typhus, and dysentery.  By 1699 the colony was abandoned and the Scots returned home.

Undeterred by the failure of the first Darien Colony, the Company of Scotland settled a new colony in late 1699.  The second colony made all the same mistakes of the first, and within weeks settlers died like flies due to disease, starvation, and attacks by natives.  Worse yet, the Spanish got wind of the colony, to them an illegal settlement as Panama was considered Spanish territory.  In February of 1700, a force of Spanish soldiers laid siege to the fort, eventually forcing the Scots to surrender.  The remaining colonists were allowed to return home in peace.

The failure of Darien Colony was a disaster for Scotland. Those who invested in the colony saw their wealth disappear with a flash.   The Scottish economy tanked as it saw one quarter of its wealth vanish into thin air.  Worse yet was the fate of the Darien colonists.  Of a total of 3,700 settlers, only around 500 survived.  William Paterson himself journeyed with the first expedition, and would lose his wife and child to disease.  

In 1707 England proposed a treaty in which Scotland and England would form one United Kingdom.  The Acts of Union were highly unpopular among the Scots, especially Scottish nobles who treasured their sovereignty and power.  To sweeten the deal the English offered a payment of £400,000 to the Scottish Parliament to replace the wealth lost in the Darien Scheme.   The Act of Union passed in May of 1707.

[histeriacomic]

The Failing of New Caledonia

I just. Dear viewers, can I just say how much I hated having to write this comic? Not because of Scotland or anything. It's because there is literally so much to explain to truly understand this topic.  I couldn't include all of that and keep it short and sweet.  I'm absolutely loving Scotland at the moment, and I can't get over his and England's relationship. (Honestly, I feel there's this really deep, buried brotherly bond. ...It's just ... very deep.)

So anyway.  In Scotland, there had been a famine in the 1690's (which is why Scotland looks a little ill). A lot of Scots fled to Ireland, not exactly helping their weakened economy, so the nobility and landowners decided that they needed to make Scotland a competitive state within Europe.  They sent an expidition of around 1,200 settlers to Darien, Panama to set up a trading colony in 'New Caledonia' ('New Scotland'). Guys. I'm not going to lie. I nearly cried. Shit. Sucked. Practically no one came by for trade, and thanks to not storing their food properly, it would go bad. Within a year, around 900 people died thanks to fever, and disease. Only one ship had made it back to Scotland, but the news it carried of the failed settlement didn't arrive in time to stop a second expidition of 1,000+ people. It didn't help any of them that the Spanish decided to attack, and England, being a dick, refused to help them since they didn't want to incite a war with Spain.  (I suppose you get tired after a while.)  

This came to be known as the Darien Scheme, and you can imagine that because of all this, things weren't pretty with the nobles' and landowners' money purses....

Historic UK Letters from Panama (BBC article) View/Read online!