Following the Money through the British Empire

Tyler Cowen has caught up with the story about how the Brits took over Newfoundland in a financial collapse in 1933. A great story it is, but is it really all that different from how the Brits took over Egypt in 1875, plucked from the ashes of Ismail Pasha's Suez Canal schemes?  Or, come to that, the Act of Union of 1706, which thrust Scotland into the arms of England after the collapse of the Scottish Darien Folly?   Indeed how much of the development of the British Empire in India can be traced through the ledger-books of improvident petty princes?  There must be hundreds more examples.