Darien Colony

Has anyone ever failed this hard before or since?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Florida
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/how-bolivia-lost-its-hat/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

only scots can fail so hard.

although in all seriousness that incident is fairly typical of scotland, particularly the blaming of the english for the failures of the scottish, the bitterness and the scapegoating and judicial murder of innocents to appease the scottish public

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The English asked the Spanish to blockade the Scots' ports and Scotland had been more or less impoverished by the increasingly Anglocentric monarchy. There was nothing they could've done.

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This.

Why did they chose such a terrible place
Check the mortality of workers during the building of the canal

I just like the fact a guy became a pirate with the equivalent of a huge proportion of Scotland's national budget.

rofl I know right? the scots failed so hard that they decided within the next few years to surrender their sovereignty to england in 1707 and stuck to writing shitty economic textbooks and philosophy

translation plz

Based Spain totalmy BTFO's Scotshits.HAHAHAHHAHAHAH

none of that is true, the english refused to intervene with the spanish who were understandably pissed given that the scots were colonising territory claimed by spain, a decision that was pretty understandably considering that england was already at war with france and couldnt afford to piss of two powers at once.

as for the idea that scotland had in some way been impoverished by england, firstly at the time there was personal union not legal and political union, william III held both thrones but both had seperate parliaments doing the decision making, so no direct action by england could be held responsible, indirectly the english had caused relative poverty in scotland by prospering themselves and thus driving up prices while several years of bad harvests had significantly fucked the almost exclusively agricultural scottish economy.

but the fact that the scots could raise as much money as they did suggests that scotland wasnt that badly impoverished

"I will forever uphold with strength and truth Scotland's languages and rights. Even though we don't have much money, we have our independence".

I'm assuming it's a riff on the fact that James VI fancied himself a patriot who was a patron of Scots poetry and law but when he moved to England he started speaking English and more or less ignored Scotland for the rest of his life.

can you blame him?

scotland was a turbulent pest hole of a place, neck deep in poverty, that had driven his mother into exile and death.

compared to that the court in england was a welcoming place

>more or less ignored Scotland for the rest of his life.
that was his son Charles, James' handling of Scotland fine

It was technically fine I suppose but it was very hands-off. My area of study is Scottish literature so the fact that his patronage of Scots ended once he moved his court to London leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

honestly given the products of scots literature its a miracle he kept funding them that long

yeah I think you're right about the hands-off part. but also remember that at this time england and scotland shared only a monarch. scotland had its own political system and church (which were inseparable really). James naturally gravitated to the kingdom that offered him more wealth, patronage and prestige. It's also to my understanding that Scottish politics was complex, chaotic and often violent, so I don't blame him for moving south kek. As for James cutting off patronage of Scots- I thought he still kept many scots as advisors and courtiers, even if he didn't patronize the arts? Anyway, it's ironic that James became anglicized considering the xenophobic insults hurled at him by englishmen.

Ah, I meant Scots as in the language. Before moving south he'd written a treatise on how Scots was superior to English for writing poetry in, but after his move south he started writing in English and urged his Scottish courtiers to write in English as well, and have their books printed in London rather than Edinburgh.

Any other crazy events like this in history?

-french attempt to build the panama canal by lesseps (suez canal) and eiffel (eiffel tower). the government sunk tremendous amounts of money into the project when it started to run into obstacles and there was fear of default. lobbyists also bribed a large share of the national assembly to get behind the proposal. anti-government mps found evidence of the bribery and a huge scandal erupted in 1891, during which one of the leading financiers of the project, reinach, killed himself and many mps were implicated.
-the execution of leonard da vinci's plan by the florentine republic under piero soderini to divert the arno (on which florence was located), so as to cut of pisa, which revolted against florentine rule, from having fresh water or using it as a defence. in short, the scheme cost huge amounts of money and failed spectacularly, as the leonardo was an idiot and pisans harassed the men diverting working on the project.
-Stalin's construction of a canal connecting the baltic and white seas, which cost the lives of some 12000 men and still more became sick or disabled, was so rushed and quotas and deadlines so unrealistically high that the canal lacked the equipment or the depth to handle 20th century carriers/commerce/industry. so for all the money sunk into it, it brought paltry returns, the most valuable of which was propaganda value for Stalin's regime.

I still don't think any of these are on the same levels as the Scottish fuck up.

I think I know the biggest fuck up of all history.

China, in the 1300s/1400s becomes isolationist, whereas if their leaders were akin to europeans we would live in a world where everything east of iraq was under chinese influence.

some more off the top of my head:
-jonestown
-people who moved to america to institute communities on the line of fourier's absolutely crazy utopian ideas.
-this sad tale: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Florida
-papa doc duval of haiti was an absolute madman
-taiping rebellion
-tupac amaru rebellion
-madagascar's attempt to build industry in the mid 1800s using slave labor
-munster rebellion/german peasant war
-athenian expedition during the peloponnesian war
-spartans at the battle of sphacteria, peloponnesian war
-carthage and dionysius of syracuse; in fact, any attempt by carthage to conquer sicily
-carthage during the first punic war, and all the other wars for that matter...
-antiochus and the romans
-romans in the teutoberg forest or carrhae or adrianople
-collapse of the caliphate of cordoba is just tragic
-sadam trying to conquer iran
-egypt and syria during the six day war
-gaddafi's invasion of Chad
-america and vietnam :^)
-paraguay in the war of the triple alliance
-bolivia-
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/how-bolivia-lost-its-hat/
-ivan the terrible and the livonian wars
-russia's time of troubles
-charles xii's defeat at poltava and his humiliating exile in the ottoman empire for six years.
-poland's attempt to reform itself before being partitioned
-china and the opium wars; sino-japanese war
-frederick iv of denmark and the thirty years' war
i could go on

the florentine plan was pretty disastrous as it bankrupted florence and facilitated the return of the medici and the end of the republic.

Wow, Colombian here and I had no idea of this. Guess that was the extent of the Scots' failure