ABSTRACT
On 9 June 1772, Alexander Fordyce, the Scottish leading partner of the London bank of Neale, James, Fordyce, and Down, absconded to the Continent after being caught wrong-footed in his speculations in East India stock.1 Fordyce’s ight and eventual surrender the following September was the rst act of a multifaceted nancial crisis which raged for about a year.2 The initial distress in the London market peaked on 22 June with a series of bank runs, when ‘a universal bankruptcy was expected, and the stoppage of every banker looked for’.3 The simultaneous impact in Scotland was even more spectacular, when the ambitious and experimental Ayr Bank (Douglas, Heron &Co.) was also forced to stop payment on 24 June with over £1.2 million in liabilities.4
