Michael Fry: We must judge our successes on our own terms

THE modern Scottish plays put on at the Edinburgh International Festival are almost uniformly awful, so we will be lucky if this year's offering, Caledonia by Alistair Beaton, is any exception.

It will revisit Darien, one of the great Scottish disasters, and the men like William Paterson who three centuries ago led 2,000 compatriots to squalid, stinking death in pestilential Panama.

Perhaps I am wrong to be pessimistic, but I do note that the young Beaton left Scotland at the earliest opportunity and today lives 400 miles away in Holloway, the grubby bit of London at the bottom of the A1 thronged with media luvvies. No doubt they stand ready to applaud their neighbour when, according to his promises, he wields his brickbats to bash the bankers, mostly villainous Scottish bankers, who lost all the country's money in 1700 just as they would lose it again in 2009. In metropolitan circles, this amounts to proof that Scotland will always need English gold. As Beaton so delicately puts it, his attitude to nationalism is "ambivalent".

For myself, I have to expect that this August I will walk out of Caledonia at the interval, following what has become a melancholy habit with these modern Scottish plays. But I recall one exception. And by coincidence David Greig's The Speculator, premiered in 1999, also dealt with that most dismal decade in Scottish history, the one that saw the Treaty of Union in 1707.

Greig focused on another striking figure of the time, John Law, who had to get out of Scotland for his Jacobitism but then went to persuade the French of the joys of financial speculation. His Mississippi scheme met the same sticky end as the Darien venture – and with even more catastrophic results, since France was a great, rich country while Scotland was only a small, poor one.

The play found solace in the sorry affair, all the same. With their Celtic love of intoxicants, the Scots characters discover in the New World various novel substances to smoke, substances which make them dream. And what they dream of is something not small and poor but great and rich. They catch a glimpse of a better life.

People tend only to remember the successful human enterprises, yet most human enterprises fail. If we take the example of the colonial expeditions of the 17th century, the vast majority from all nations failed and left behind them only the bleached bones of the voyagers. If we take something quite different – modern banks – and follow their fate as recounted in banking histories, we find again that the vast majority failed. The three Scottish banks just about surviving today are a mere remnant of the dozens that existed at one time or another, the rest having gone bust, or at least got themselves into such a state they had to be taken over by another bank.

So failure is a norm, especially for small, poor nations. Yet success is not excluded. Darien failed but Singapore and Hong Kong succeeded. These were founded on the same principle as Darien, in the form of trading outposts on an alien shore for the purpose of economic exchange, not political dominance. This, I argue in my book The Scottish Empire, was a distinctive national pattern of colonialism. It so happens that Singapore and Hong Kong were first founded by Scots, though the locals at the receiving end of the exchanges long ago took them over.

There is a similar pattern with banking. Scots played a major part in its history: enough here to mention the invention of both the banknote and the overdraft. Scottish banks were soon outgrown many times over by the banks of bigger countries, not least England, which besides legislated in 1845 to stop them competing with its own banks. The Scots had in their small way been too successful, as even Karl Marx noted. Still they were to be found as bankers all over the world, and those who stayed at home never quite lost the ambition for something bigger and better.

The ambition burgeoned in the shape of Sir Fred Goodwin, who briefly made the Royal Bank of Scotland the fourth largest in the world. In the end he failed on a scale exceeding even that of Paterson and Law. But did this not merely conform to the standard pattern of trial-and-error that dogs the whole of Scottish history? Usually the error predominates – Flodden, Culloden – but just now and again – Bannockburn – Scots get it right. On that reading, Fred the Shred was a William Wallace. Let us hope there will one day be a Robert Bruce.

At any rate there is a pattern to the culture. Mostly Scotland is a dispiriting provincial dump where nothing ever happens and what does happen goes wrong. Yet Scots, from whatever obscure hereditary cause, are capable of leaps of the imagination. Often these go wrong too. But sometimes something clicks and then the whole country is transformed.

There may be a political lesson in this, but for now let us concentrate on a cultural one. Scotland has a minor, fragmented culture with no great metropolitan centre to set its trends and validate its achievements, as England possesses in London, France in Paris or the United States in New York.

Yet just look at the achievements: Burns, Scott and Stevenson would be quite enough for any other small country, as would Ramsay, Raeburn and Wilkie. The Dutch do not reproach themselves for having no great poets, nor the Hungarians for having no great painters. So why should Scotland worry about having no great drama, or at least very little? Beaton will doubtless underline the point for us as he bashes the bankers.

This inability to see the culture in its own terms persists even though we have a whole cultural establishment paid, rather handsomely, to do just that. Its latest recruit is Andrew Dixon, chief executive of Creative Scotland, just appointed all the way from vibrant Tyneside to "deliver a new model of cultural development of international significance".

But have we not long had such a model? For those who never noticed, ours is not a culture of pomp and circumstance, glamour and glitter, gimmicks and celebrities – but a quiet and unassuming culture, all the deeper for that, where people are content to play the fiddle or read a novel while rain beats at the window and a fire sputters in the grate. To find it, read Scott or look at Wilkie.

At least this is the sort of culture Dixon might in total ignorance leave to get on by itself. It will still be there long after he and his luvvies have gone to the great wine-and-cheese reception in the sky.