The Rise and Fall of the City of Money: A Financial History of Edinburgh

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It started and ended with a financial catastrophe. The Darien disaster of 1700 drove Scotland into union with England, but spawned the institutions which transformed Edinburgh into a global financial centre.

The crash of 2008 wrecked the citys two largest and oldest banks and its reputation. In the three intervening centuries, Edinburgh became a hothouse of financial innovation, prudent banking, reliable insurance and smart investing. The face of the city changed too as money transformed it from medieval squalor to Georgian elegance.

This is the story, not just of the institutions which were respected worldwide, but of the personalities too, such as the two hard-drinking Presbyterian ministers who founded the first actuarially-based pension fund; Sir Walter Scott, who faced financial ruin, but wrote his way out of it; the men who financed American railways and eastern rubber plantations with Scottish money; and Fred Goodwin, notorious CEO of RBS, who took the bank to be the biggest in the world, but crashed and burned in 2008.

Reviews

'I loved Ray Permans The Rise and Fall of the City of Money (Birlinn, RRP25) a fabulous history of the crises and flashes of entrepreneurial brilliance that made Edinburgh the UKs second-biggest financial city. A meticulously researched book of stories about the people who rose and fell with the city - bank directors who ended up in jail, aristocrats who ended up broke, and clever investment managers who set up the firms your pension is probably still with today'

-- Merryn Somerset Webb, editor in chief of MoneyWeek * Selecting for the Financial Times Books of the Year, 2019) *

Author Bio

Ray Perman is a financial journalist who has reported for numerous publications, including the Financial Times.He is a former chief executive of the industry representative body, Scottish Financial Enterprise and a former director of the David Hume Institute.