Business Archives in 2010 - July

Royal Bank of Scotland Group
UNESCO announced the inaugural inscriptions to its new Memory of the World (UK) Register, which included the Royal Bank of Scotland's records of the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies, also known as the Darien company.

The inscribed archives relate to the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies. Dating from the 1690s, they tell the story of a failed Scottish attempt to build a trading colony at Darien, in present-day Panama. The scheme’s catastrophic failure prompted an economic collapse that was instrumental in forcing Scotland towards political Union with England, finally enacted in 1707. As a result the archives are uniquely significant in documenting the economic circumstances underlying the foundation of modern Scotland.