Dr Simon Buck (IASH) and Bianca Packham (Heritage Collections) are pleased to share Dreams of Darien, an online Library exhibition shining a light on the University of Edinburgh's links to the Darien 'scheme' and the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies (1695-1707).
The exhibition showcases under-examined materials from the University's collections and elsewhere to reconsider the ways in which University of Edinburgh staff and students were entangled – financially and intellectually – in the activities of the Company of Scotland, a joint-stock company that attempted to establish the Scots colony of New Caledonia on the Isthmus of Darien in what is present-day Panama near the end of the seventeenth century.
The exhibition has involved collaboration with academics within and without Edinburgh; universities and heritage organisations in the UK and Colombia; and representatives of the Gunadule, Darien's Indigenous and sovereign inhabitants.
Part of this exhibition is based on research conducted by Dr Simon Buck, Research Fellow (2022-24) at IASH. It emerges from the work of the Decolonised Transformations Project in confronting the University’s legacies of slavery, colonialism and the development of racial thought. Panels on the Gunadule people were co-produced with Olowaili Green Santacruz, Amelicia Santacruz Álvarez and David Sierra Márquez.
Special thanks to Olowaili Green Santacruz, Amelicia Santacruz Álvarez, David Sierra Márquez, former Fellow Dr Paola Vargas Arana, Kathleen S. Murphy, Zander Johnston, Emma Fraser, Steve Carter, Diana Paton, Nicola Frith, Thomas Ahnert, Esther Mijers, NatWest Group Archives, Arcadia, the Archivo Histórico de Antioquia, the British Library, University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections and the volunteers who took part in the community consultation for this exhibition.
View the exhibition here: https://exhibitions.ed.ac.uk/exhibitions/dreams-of-darien
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