What was the biggest waste of money in human history?

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The time to compete with Europe’s major economic powers by attempting to establish the forerunner to the Panama Canal.

At the end of the 17th Century, Scotland was in a bit of a rut – by which I mean it was recovering from successive famines and political turmoil. Scotland’s elites decided that what they needed to do to turn things around was break out as a great European power and get in on the mercantile movement. As such, they created the .

The first problem with their plan was that, well, most of the world by that point had been claimed by the reigning European powers, and there wasn’t much opportunity left for Scotland to exploit. This was further complicated by the which, in all of its monopolistic glory, went out of its way to ensure that the Company never gained access to European financiers or secure trade agreements with England that could compete with its own.

The CSTAI’s solution to the latter problem was to stir nationalist passions in Scotland and solicit contributions from the public, which ended up totaling some £400,000 at the time.

If that doesn’t sound like a lot of money, hang on a second.

£400,000 from that era comes out to somewhere in the neighborhood of £54 million in today’s currency ($83-ish million for the American audience), but even that doesn’t quite capture the size of the Scots’ investment in the project. If evaluated as an economic cost - or what the value of that amount means against the nation's total economic output - the value of the investment rises to somewhere in the neighborhood of £9.5 billion ($14.7-ish billion) in today’s currency. At the time, that amount of money represented something along the lines of one-fifth of Scotland’s economy – which today would be something like £31.7 billion ($49.1 billion).

So, you know, we are talking some significant bucks here.

Adequately financed, five ships and 1,200 colonists set sail for the Gulf of Darien on the Isthmus of Panama. Keen students of history at this point should be asking, “Wasn’t Spain in charge over there at the time?”

Yeah, Scotland never bothered to address the “first problem” I mentioned, hoping the then-reigning international convention of colonialism, “Do you have a flag?” on that particular plot of land would work out in their favor. It should also be noted that the Spanish twice abandoned the idea of constructing a canal on the Isthmus (probably a smart idea at the time, given the labor required), and were unlikely to allow another power to succeed in the attempt.

Better students of history might also note that the was taking place at this time. Despite historical tensions between the powers, England and Spain were allies in this war, and England really needed to keep Spain happy in order to keep the French contained. thought that allowing Scotland to just up-and-settle on Spanish territory would not help the coalition facing France, and so he advised the Spanish (and Dutch, also allies) to not assist the Scots in their scheme.

That edict pretty much doomed the colony, which collapsed under disease, famine, and lack of adequate supplies – the usual sort of problems facing new colonies. Eventually, the nearby Spanish garrisons surrounded the weak and dying colonists and expelled them from the region, and that was the end of Scotland’s colonial ambitions.

As you might imagine, the loss of one-fifth of one’s economy to a project that resulted in no returns whatsoever was a problem back home. The economic destabilization paved the way for the , which formally absorbed Scotland into the British Empire (even though they'd already been sharing the same monarch for a century, but hey, we'll go with it).

The Acts did provide for an oddly-specific £398,085 10s that was, effectively, compensation to Scotland for the expedition's failure, but was masked as a kind of "debt servicing liability payments" - sorta - which eventually turned into .

So I’ll offer up that losing so much money with absolutely zero return that your very country is forced to fold - the very opposite of the project's desired outcome - ought to be ranked as one of the worst wastes of money in history.

Also read:

What's your biggest waste of money?