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. 

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: The ascent of paper money
  • 1. Famine and finance
  • 2. Britain’s first commercial bank
  • 3. The first bank war
  • 4. The Equivalent and the beginning of paper money
  • 5. Royal Bank and the second bank war
  • 6. Hard drinking ministers found the pensions industry
  • 7. Jacobites defeated by bankers
  • 8. Drummond’s vision for a city on a hill
  • 9. Glasgow rivalry and the unfortunate Mr Trotter
  • 10. Collapse of the Ayr bank
  • 11. Dundas versus Dundas
  • 12. Riot and revolution
  • 13. Wartime austerity
• Part 2: The evolution of the Scottish system
  • 14. Sycophants of existing power
  • 15. Insurance and the first fire brigade
  • 16. Wotherspoon and the Widows
  • 17. The ruin of Walter Scott (and how he got out of it)
  • 18. The bankruptcy of Edinburgh
  • 19. English money for Scottish railways
  • 20. The failure of the Western Bank
  • 21. Bankers in the dock
• Part 3: Modernisation and internationalisation
  • 22. Financing American railroads
  • 23. Ivory and Gifford
  • 24. Consolidation
  • 25. The slow decline of gentlemanly capitalism
  • 26. Banking: the cultural revolution
  • 27. Fund management: contrasting cultures
  • 28. The end of the exchange
• Part 4: Triumph and disaster
  • 29. The battle for NatWest
  • 30. Into the arms of Halifax
  • 31. The ‘Haliban’
  • 32. Masters of integration
  • 33. 2007: ‘We don’t do sub-prime’
  • 34. 2008: Market meltdown
  • 35. ‘They are going bust this afternoon’
  • 36. The end of an ‘Auld Sang’
• Glossary
• Sources
• Notes and references
• Index