ISBN : 9782296136298
DREAMS OF EMPIRE: SCOTLAND, CALEDONIA AND THE EMPORIUM OF THE INDIES
In the late 1690s, the European commercial and political worlds were keenly interested in the news of the emergence of a Scottish empire at the heart of Spanish America. The Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies, by planting a colony at Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, attempted to connect the great oceans of the Atlantic and Pacific and thereby situate Scotland at the heart of global trade. In the words of the scheme's chief promoter, William Paterson, the Company of Scotland seized the "key to the universe", and aimed at nothing less than enabling Scots "to give Laws to both Oceans and to become Arbitrators of the Commerciall world".1 Despite this grand scheme for global domination, the Darien venture which created the colony of Caledonia is widely regarded as a catastrophic failure. Although some scholars have begun to reassess it, the "disaster" of Darien...