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1695 the Bank of Scotland was founded with the help of William Paterson in Edinburgh. Flushed with his earlier success in founding the Bank of England a few years earlier, Paterson had travelled to the Americas. He became beguiled by travellers' tales of Darien, a wonderful land on the Isthmus of Panama, as told to him by a sailor he met in a bar in London. Returning to Edinburgh, Paterson persuaded the Scottish government that Scotland should not be left behind in establishing colonies in the New World. Unfortunately, England, France and Spain were already fighting over the best bits, so Patterson used his “insider knowledge” to recommend Panama as the place most likely to to provide Scotland with its colonial base. The resulting expedition to “New Caledonia” was both a personal disaster for Patterson, and ultimately a national one. Analysts have estimated that up to a quarter of the money in circulation in Scotland was lost in trying to claim the Central American swamps. Many families lost their life savings. Scotland, first in so many technological advances, had the dubious privilege of being the first nation state to go bust, and was bailed out by the London government through the Act of Union of 1707.

It was probably events like this that led Burns to describe some of his compatriots as “a parcel o' rogues”. It was an eerie parallel with the great banking crisis of 2008, when a similar venture, this time into the virtual swamps of the global financial markets, was to bring down the two major Edinburgh banks, leading to a bail-out by UK taxpayers. (At the time of writing, there is no equivalent to the Act of Union on the horizon.)

The new British Empire was on the rise, with international trade leading to the growth of the great mercantile cities of Liverpool and Glasgow, with tobacco and slavery as early benefactors. We also saw the sucess of our east coast ports such as Hull, with the wool trade providing much of the early investment, as it did in the west. With the arrival of Empire, the textile trade would specialise with cotton in Glasgow and Liverpool and jute in Dundee.