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Medal (obverse), of Darien Company

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Medal (obverse), of Darien Company
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Darien Company Silver gilt medal, presented to the owner, Colonel Campbell of Finat, for Storming of Fort Touboucan, 8 February 1700. This is the obverse of a Darien Company silver-gilt medal. The medal was presented to Scottish soldiers by Colonel Alexander Campbell of Finab for the successful attack on Spanish troops in 1700 during the attempt to establish a Scottish colony at Darien, Central America. The victory was short-lived.

The Darien Scheme was set up by an overseas trading company, the Company of Scotland, created in 1695 to give Scottish merchants and investors the opportunities that their English counterparts had in the East India Company. Look closely at the coat of arms inscribed on this medal, which includes the figures of an Indigenous American and an African man. The Latin motto translates to ‘Where the world expands, its united strength is stronger’, suggesting the economic benefits that would accrue to Scotland through trade on a global scale. Although individual Scots had taken advantage of opportunities in English-held Virginia and Dutch-controlled Suriname decades earlier, the Scheme intended to license slaving voyages and members made attempts to formally establish themselves in the slave trade system. Between 1698 and 1700, the Company undertook an expedition to establish a Scottish colonial trading centre at Darien in Panama. Its spectacular failure, due to a combination of ill health and English and Spanish interference, resulted in the deaths of two thousand men and the collapse of the Duke of Hamilton’s plan to traffic enslaved Africans to labour in the gold mines of Panama. Crucially, the failure led to the loss of a quarter of Scotland’s liquid capital, which hit its landed and merchant elites. This formed the background to the negotiation of the Act of Union 1707, in which Article 15 offered Scotland compensation for the Darien failure, and Article 4, the right to trade in any British port. The latter was to enable Scottish people to benefit from the spoils of colonial trade and the Transatlantic slave system. Consider again the meaning of the motto from the perspective of the people represented on the medal. The ‘world’ certainly did not include the kind of people who would suffer the devastating loss of their land, resources, freedom and lives in a scheme intended to bring great wealth to Scotland.

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