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Content advisory

This is an exhibition about colonial exploitation, violence and oppression. This exhibition features records that reflect some of the racist and colonial views held by Europeans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some materials refer to the trafficking and enslavement of people of African descent, including acts of racialised and gendered violence.

Dreams of Darien

Map showing the Isthmus of Darien

The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies (1695-1707) was a joint-stock company, incorporated by an Act of Scottish Parliament, most well known for attempting to establish the Scottish colony of New Caledonia on the Isthmus of Darien in what is present-day Panama. This was commonly known as the Darien ‘scheme’.

Designed to create a trading outpost in a strategically important, mineral-rich region, New Caledonia was one of Scotland’s most significant colonial enterprises prior to Union with England (1706-7).

Like many universities and other institutions, the University of Edinburgh is committed to confronting its history and legacies of slavery, colonialism and the development of racial thought. As part of that wider reckoning, this exhibition looks at the University’s links to the Company of Scotland.

Main Image: John Senex, A draft of the Golden & adjacent Islands, with part of ye Isthmus of Darien as it was taken by Capt. Ienefer where ye Scots West-India Company were settled (London: Printed for D. Browne, 1721), courtesy of Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library