Someone famous, or perhaps not so famous, as I can’t remember the name, actually I can barely remember the quote but it went something like: “Of all the races, the Jews and the Scots have had the largest impact on the world economy, per capita.” I have no idea why this should be so, I’m sure the Armenians and the Dutch should get a mention but I’ll ponder that later. Suffice to say I am going to a lecture on Saturday by Professor Tom Devine, an incomparably smart individual from Edinburgh University. The lecture is entitled: “An Empire of Commerce: Three centuries of Scottish Enterprise in the East.” Here is an introduction, at the bottom is a link to reserve tickets:
“By 1914 the British Empire could claim dominion over 750 million people or around a quarter of the earth’s population. Yet, remarkably, much of the governance, commerce, banking and military engagement of this vast worldwide enterprise was managed by Scots, a nation of only 4 million at the time. Scotland in fact claimed not simply a reasonable but a quite indecent share of the imperial spoils.
Nowhere was this more true than of India, South Asia, Hong Kong and China in the centuries after 1700 where such giant businesses as Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Mackinnon Group, Guthrie and Company and the Burmah Oil Company were all of Scottish origin.
This lecture, employing the fruits of recent scholarship and research, will seek to describe the extraordinary scale and impact of the Scottish commercial empire in the east, explain its expansion, especially in the Victorian era, and finally account for its relative decline in the twentieth century.”
http://www.edinburghcampaign.com/Network/Default.aspx?PageID=441