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Author: John Prebble
Publisher: London : Secker & Warburg
ISBN: 9780436386060
Category : Darien (Panama and Colombia)
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
In 1698 the Parliament of Scotland, in one of its last acts before the nation lost its political identity, decided to establish a noble trading company and settle a colony. The site chosen for the colony was Darien on the Isthmus of Panama. Three years later the "noble undertaking", crippled by the quarrelsome stupidity of its leaders, deliberately obstructed by the English Government, and opposed in arms of Spain, had ended in stunning disaster. Nine fine ships owned by the Company had been sunk, burnt or abandoned. Over two thousand men, women and children who went to the fever-ridden colony never returned.
Author: John Prebble
Publisher: London : Secker & Warburg
ISBN: 9780436386060
Category : Darien (Panama and Colombia)
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
In 1698 the Parliament of Scotland, in one of its last acts before the nation lost its political identity, decided to establish a noble trading company and settle a colony. The site chosen for the colony was Darien on the Isthmus of Panama. Three years later the "noble undertaking", crippled by the quarrelsome stupidity of its leaders, deliberately obstructed by the English Government, and opposed in arms of Spain, had ended in stunning disaster. Nine fine ships owned by the Company had been sunk, burnt or abandoned. Over two thousand men, women and children who went to the fever-ridden colony never returned.
Author: John McKendrick
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 085790261X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
The Company of Scotland and its attempts to establish the colony of Caledonia on the inhospitable isthmus of Panama in the late seventeenth century is one of the most tragic moments of Scottish history. Devised by William Paterson, the stratagem was to create a major trading station between Europe and the East. It could have been a triumph, but inadequate preparation and organization ensured it was a catastrophe - of the 3000 settlers who set sail in 1688 and 1699, only a handful returned, the rest having succumbed to disease, and the enormous financial loss was a key factor in ensuring union with England in 1707. Based on archive research in the UK and Panama, as well as extensive travelling in Darien itself, John McKendrick explores this fascinating and seminal moment in Scottish history and uncovers fascinating new information from New World archives about the role of the English and Spanish, and about the identities of the settlers themselves.
Author: John Prebble
Publisher: Birlinn Publishers
ISBN: 9781841580548
Category : Darien (Panama and Colombia)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
In defiance of the king and in the face of English hostility, the Scottish parliament set out to establish a colony in Central America. This dream of William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England was to end in disaster.
Author: Douglas Watt
Publisher: Luath Press Ltd
ISBN: 1909912913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
The Price of Scotland covers a well-known episode in Scottish history, the ill-fated Darien Scheme. It recounts for the first time in almost forty years, the history of the Company of Scotland, looking at previously unexamined evidence and considering the failure in light of the Company's financial records. Douglas Watt offers the reader a new way of looking at this key moment in history, from the attempt to raise capital in London in 1695 through to the shareholder bail-out as part of the Treaty of Union in 1707. With the tercentenary of the Union in May 2007, The Price of Scotland provides a timely reassessment of this national disaster. REVIEWS Douglas Watt has brought an economist's eye and poet's sensibility in the Price of Scotland... to show definitively... that over-ambition and mismanagement, rather than English mendacity, doomed Scotland's imperial ambitions. - THE OBSERVER The Price of Scotland treats Darien as a financial mania. - THE FINANCIAL TIMES Exceptionally well written, it reads like a novel. As I say - if you're not Scottish and live here - read it. If you're Scottish read it anyway. It's a very, very good book. - i-on magazine The must-have book on the events in advance of the Act of Union that brought Scotland and England together in 1707 is Douglas Watt's The Price of Scotland. It's a fantastic run-through of the "catastrophic failure" of the Darien Scheme - the creation of the Company of Scotland to establish a Central American colony. THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Author: Ray Perman
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 178885229X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 512
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Book Description
It started and ended with a financial catastrophe. The Darien disaster of 1700 drove Scotland into union with England, but spawned the institutions which transformed Edinburgh into a global financial centre. The crash of 2008 wrecked the city's two largest and oldest banks – and its reputation. In the three intervening centuries, Edinburgh became a hothouse of financial innovation, prudent banking, reliable insurance and smart investing. The face of the city changed too as money transformed it from medieval squalor to Georgian elegance. This is the story, not just of the institutions which were respected worldwide, but of the personalities too, such as the two hard-drinking Presbyterian ministers who founded the first actuarially-based pension fund; Sir Walter Scott, who faced financial ruin, but wrote his way out of it; the men who financed American railways and eastern rubber plantations with Scottish money; and Fred Goodwin, notorious CEO of RBS, who took the bank to be the biggest in the world, but crashed and burned in 2008.
Author: John U. Bacon
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006266655X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER The "riveting" (National Post) tick-tock account of the largest manmade explosion in history prior to the atomic bomb, and the equally astonishing tales of survival and heroism that emerged from the ashes “Enthralling. ... Gripping. ... A captivating and emotionally investing journey.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette After steaming out of New York City on December 1, 1917, laden with a staggering three thousand tons of TNT and other explosives, the munitions ship Mont-Blanc fought its way up the Atlantic coast, through waters prowled by enemy U-boats. As it approached the lively port city of Halifax, Mont-Blanc's deadly cargo erupted with the force of 2.9 kilotons of TNT—the most powerful explosion ever visited on a human population, save for HIroshima and Nagasaki. Mont-Blanc was vaporized in one fifteenth of a second; a shockwave leveled the surrounding city. Next came a thirty-five-foot tsunami. Most astounding of all, however, were the incredible tales of survival and heroism that soon emerged from the rubble. This is the unforgettable story told in John U. Bacon's The Great Halifax Explosion: a ticktock account of fateful decisions that led to doom, the human faces of the blast's 11,000 casualties, and the equally moving individual stories of those who lived and selflessly threw themselves into urgent rescue work that saved thousands. The shocking scale of the disaster stunned the world, dominating global headlines even amid the calamity of the First World War. Hours after the blast, Boston sent trains and ships filled with doctors, medicine, and money. The explosion would revolutionize pediatric medicine; transform U.S.-Canadian relations; and provide physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who studied the Halifax explosion closely when developing the atomic bomb, with history's only real-world case study demonstrating the lethal power of a weapon of mass destruction. Mesmerizing and inspiring, Bacon's deeply-researched narrative brings to life the tragedy, bravery, and surprising afterlife of one of the most dramatic events of modern times.
Author: Daniel P. Aldrich
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226012891
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
The factor that makes some communities rebound quickly from disasters while others fall apart: “A fascinating book on an important topic.”—E.L. Hirsch, in Choice Each year, natural disasters threaten the strength and stability of communities worldwide. Yet responses to the challenges of recovery vary greatly and in ways that aren’t explained by the magnitude of the catastrophe or the amount of aid provided by national governments or the international community. The difference between resilience and disrepair, as Daniel P. Aldrich shows, lies in the depth of communities’ social capital. Building Resilience highlights the critical role of social capital in the ability of a community to withstand disaster and rebuild both the infrastructure and the ties that are at the foundation of any community. Aldrich examines the post-disaster responses of four distinct communities—Tokyo following the 1923 earthquake, Kobe after the 1995 earthquake, Tamil Nadu after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina—and finds that those with robust social networks were better able to coordinate recovery. In addition to quickly disseminating information and financial and physical assistance, communities with an abundance of social capital were able to minimize the migration of people and valuable resources out of the area. With governments increasingly overstretched and natural disasters likely to increase in frequency and intensity, a thorough understanding of what contributes to efficient reconstruction is more important than ever. Building Resilience underscores a critical component of an effective response.
Author: Leith Davis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316510816
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
The first book to analyze the interplay of cultural memory, politics and the changing media ecology of early eighteenth-century Britain.
Author: James Lewis
Publisher: Intermediate Technology Publications
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
This book addresses the long-overdue imbalance in disaster management: an over-emphasis on post-disaster assistance and a lack of attention to vulnerability reduction. It answers the fundamental question in this debate: how can we mould pre-disaster development initiatives to become the most appropriate means for vulnerability reduction The book reasserts and reapplies some of the basic concepts and issues which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, with the message that development is a prime medium both of vulnerability and its reduction. The author examines requirements for long-term change so that conditions which have become the context for catastrophe can be modified. By focusing on longer-term policies and activities now, emergency relief efforts have a positive context within which to contribute to development and the likelihood of recurrence will be reduced. The book contains case-studies from Sri Lanka, the Caribbean and the South Pacific and focuses on hazards of all kinds, setting out to redress the balance between large-scale disasters of global significance and small-scale disasters that are a matter of everyday existence.
Author: Todd Balf
Publisher: Crown
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
In 1854, Leiutenant Isaac G Strain, an ambitious American explorer and U S Naval officer, was given command of Cyane, the first ship to voyage to the Darien Gap. Strain was a natural born leader, a wild-haired, wiry-strong frontiersman who had travelled extensively throughout the Southern Hemisphere. Greatly admired, Strain was expected to successfully cross the ithsmus of Central America through the Darien Gap. However, the expedition would prove to be perilous. Armed with fraudulent information about the areas rugged terrain, phony maps and only a small supply of food, Strain and his team of 29 men ventured far from their ship and became lost in this mountainous, steep-banked jungle, full of unfriendly natives that attacked the party. Beaten down by intense heat and days of walking, some of Strain's men contracted lurid mystery diseases, while others, despite the lush vegetation, were slowly starving to death. The situation was grim and Strain beleived that their best bet for survival was for him to force his way down river in search of help. When he did not return after 21 days, the detachment decided to back track and left Strain for dead. But Strain made it back to his men with help, though nine had perished and the rest were delirious. He managed to lead his enfeebled party nearly 200 miles to safety.
