The colony that was supposed to enshrine Scotland’s place as a world power became one of the most devastating economic catastrophes in European history. As one Scottish magazine was writing as late as 1837, the Isthmus of Darien was a “spot full of sad recollections to the minds of Scotsmen.”
Scotland’s economy was so wrecked by the venture most historians credit the Darien Disaster (as it came to be known) as a prime driver behind the 1707 Acts of Union, the Great Britain-creating agreement Scots are voting Thursday on whether to dissolve.
For one thing, the English put up £398,000 to help offset the Darien losses. But perhaps more importantly, Scottish pride took such a hit by 1707, the prospect of becoming England’s junior partner was no longer the worst-case scenario it might have been only a few years earlier.
Scotland was a poor rural, agricultural society with a population of 1.3 million in 1755.
Although Scotland lost home rule, Union allowed it to break free of a stultifying system and opened the way for the Scottish enlightenment as well as a great expansion of trade and increase in opportunity and wealth. Edinburgh economist Adam Smith concluded in 1776 that "By the union with England, the middling and inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a complete deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which had always before oppressed them."[130] Historian Jonathan Israel holds that the Union "proved a decisive catalyst politically and economically," by allowing ambitious Scots entry on an equal basis to a rich expanding empire and its increasing trade.[131]
Scotland's transformation into a rich leader of modern industry came suddenly and unexpectedly in the next 150 years, following its union with England in 1707 and its integration with the advanced English and imperial economies.[132] The transformation was led by two cities that grew rapidly after 1770. Glasgow, on the river Clyde, was the base for the tobacco and sugar trade with an emerging textile industry. Edinburgh was the administrative and intellectual centre where the Scottish Enlightenment was chiefly based.[133]
