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The Edinburgh subscriptions that bankrolled Darién - and bought Scotland's ruin
A nation poured its life savings into a Scottish-run colony in Darién - and watched fortunes vanish into the jungle; what went wrong?
The Edinburgh subscriptions that bankrolled Darién - and bought Scotland's ruin
In this episode, we lay out how Scotland raised massive domestic capital for a colonial venture and the sequence of political and financial forces that shaped the Darién scheme. We follow the money, the manifest, and the decisions that committed an entire country to a risky experiment - and ask who benefited from its failure.
Person: Sir William Alexander
Date: 1699
Location: Darién…
The skinny
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