Is it wrong that I imagine southern OTL Chile and Argentina ( patagonia basically) as an ATL Nova Scotia and the Falklands as the New Hebrides? Just seems kinda cool to me. It could thrive massively off of the whaling industry, agriculture, cattle and sheep. With a massive influx of Irish and Welsh in the late 19th century ( instead of the massive influx of Irish going to the USA as in OTL ) it could have a modern day population of maybe 25 - 35 million. I kind of imagine it as a southern hemisphere equivilent of Canada
Quite a common theme on this forum, actually. Not totally implausible, either. The population is off, though. It would need a massive immigration boom to get a population of 25m. Remember if you will that Argentina IRL has a population of 40m, Chile 15m, and Patagonia itself maybe 2m if you're being kind. There's plenty of land, yes, but no massive prospects of a glorious new life that the USA had, and with the USA as a rival its recruits are going to be a trickle at best. You might get a population of 5-8m under the right circumstances, but 25m...I don't think so.
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can show up and explain why the disastrous Darien project could never have worked or what have you.
With pleasure. The problem with the Darien Scheme, and the Scottish ambitions of empire, was that Scotland was a pitifully poor country and like most countries was trying to build an empire by trial and error. Please excuse the comment on Scottish poverty, by the way. I'm not just being a bigoted Englishman, I actually have a lot of respect for the various countries of the UK, but it's true. A lot of very preeminent historians have written of Scotland as "the poorest country in Europe". Frankly, it had a problem with the vast majority of its country being unfarmable and the rest lacking a lot of the kind of natural resources that meant it had no export sector to go off. It could just about support itself, but it had no real means of creating a lot of outbound trade. That's just the naked fact. Thus, Scotland had one shot at an empire. If the Darien Scheme went wrong, the hopes of empire were over. In fact, I'll go further. The Darien Scheme was like that mission in the film Deep Impact. Massively expensive, a huge gamble, and the prospects of it going wrong were about as bad as if they didn't bother trying to save themselves in the first place. The Darien Scheme cost £20,000 old money - probably the equivalent of about £200m in today's reckoning. The thing was, according to the best sources on this scheme, if you added up all the money in Scotland in 1706, it totalled about £100,000. The Darien Scheme cost 1/5 of all the money in Scotland. Again, I'm not being sarcastic here. This is the currently-held line according to research. The fact that Scotland offered itself to England as a result of the Darien Scheme going south should be proof enough.
So we've set up the notion that Scotland had one shot at this. Now let's look at why the Scheme was destined to fail. For a start, there's the ambition. Scotland needed money, not a place to settle. From the start, the venture was based around the need to generate trade which could be converted into cold hard cash travelling home. Scotland couldn't really expect to go out and settle a place where it could mind gold or silver - those plots were taken, frankly. So it had to trade for cash. So how can they trade? Well, they can try to make money by acting as middlemen in the trade of other nations. There's a problem here, however. The Scots had, as I recall...five ships (for the Darien Scheme, anyway). That's not going to dominate any markets any time soon, at best it's going to raise a little bit of cash to buy one or two patrons at home a bigger house. Hardly the kind of stuff which will even pay off that £20,000 debt incurred. There's another problem - the Spanish have a monopoly on trade with their empire, which means that you get arrested if you so much as dock in a Spanish port. For that matter, the Portuguese do too, except to the other naval nations (England, France, Netherlands) who have each forced the Portuguese to accept their merchants. The Scots don't exactly have the power to force this little concession for themselves. The French are unlikely to accept Scottish traders when England is hostile, and their tariffs are high. If you agree to pay French tariffs, you've lost all your profits there and then. Tariffs could be ridiculously high, so as to ensure that French trade stayed French and the empire kept running on its income. Oh, and English tariffs are very high if you aren't English, too. Then there's the Dutch, who frankly don't hold any very interesting land unless you're willing to make a
nine month journey each way to get to the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) so that's kind of a no-go. What this means is the Scots have no prospect of trading with other colonies.
So they're essentially left with one option: make their own colony and get people to trade with them. Now, reputations can't be bought, only made, so they have to expect to show that their colony is producing items before they can expect the money to come their way. This means self-sufficiency, which means finding a way of internally generating profit for at least a couple of years. Again, there's a problem here. The places they can go are limited. Africa is a big problem because of the disease right now, and all of the good spots are taken. African colonies shouldn't be expected to last if you can't pump the money in to make them last. You could try India and the Orient, but most of that is either taken, or somewhat inhospitable. It's also very far away, and thus would cause problems in both resupply and in the travel time. Australia is barely even known about right now, and is even further away. South America is possible, but the Portuguese and Spanish are well-entrenched there and have taken over all the good spots. North America is prime land, but the English and French are even better at protecting their land from intruders. The weak spot is the Spanish colonies - a lot of them are underfunded and under-protected. Central America, to be specific. The English have already shown several times that the Spanish take a long time to respond to threats in Central America, and even in 1706 people know how useful it would be to be able to trade right across the thinnest part of Panama, for the Atlantic-Pacific trade. The Caribbean islands are too small and too colonised for you to possibly stay undetected there.
So let's go for Panama. Now, we're hampered somewhat now by our choice of location. It's very hot, isn't great land for crop cultivation (grain, at least) and is inhabited by numerous tribes. That may not be a bad thing, so the colonists will struggle to grow their own food quickly, which is a must-have for continued colonial existence, but they can buy food by trading with the natives. But to trade with the natives you need either money, or something to trade. The Scots don't have money left, so now we've got our colony all planned out except for one detail: we need to find something Scotland can make in large quantities, ship over easily, and trade with the natives. Now, quantities shouldn't need to be monolithic because the tribesmen are known to often put ludicrously high values on items they want but don't have. I believe I recall reading that Raleigh, back in the 1580s, was offered 60 pelts, a vast quantity of meat and something else in abundance for
a single breastplate. And this breastplate wasn't to be worn in battle, the natives he traded with didn't really even know its military value. It was just to be an ornament for the chief, and it fetched a ridiculous price. So what can the Scots offer. Well, they blacksmiths back home, but they don't really have a surplus they can ship out. They don't really have food surpluses, so agriculture is out. In reality, the Scots shipped out the items that they really made a lot of. Those were -
wigs and shoes. I am not making this up. Wigs and shoes were what the Scottish economy could really pump out.
So we've got our Scottish colony, we've found the location, we know how it's going to operate. We now just need it to provide revenue for itself while it sets itself up, and it needs to be able to make defenses for itself within about 24 months. Any longer and the Spanish will be in to turf them out. There really is a pressing need for this colony to make money quickly for this reason. So what happened? It's simple. The natives didn't want shoes or wigs. They had no purpose for them. The natives refused to buy a single item. Consequently, the Scots had no money for resupply, and couldn't keep the Darien Scheme going. If they'd asked for more supplies, no matter the intent of the home Scots, Scotland had no more money to send them. As soon as the Darien Scheme ran out of food, the idea was over, and £20,000 had been lost. At that point, Scotland became so financially ruined that it needed a union with England. From this point on, Scottish Empire is impossible.
