The failure of New Edinburgh didn’t just kill 2,000 people; it also wiped out all the money that had been invested in—or gambled on—this doomed project. Cannily, the English promised to compensate the investors if they agreed to closer ties between the two countries. Even committed Scottish nationalists supported the 1707 Act of Union when faced with the possibility of financial ruin. “Thus,” wrote the historian John McNeill, “Great Britain was born, with the assistance of fevers from Panama.”
