Bank takeovers do not figure frequently in this column. Correction, they never figure in this column. There are others — my colleague Anatole Kaletsky springs to mind — better qualified by far to deal with the arcane detail of preference shares, special-purpose debt vehicles, backstop lines of credit, and something bafflingly called SIV-lites. Since ordinary mortals rarely penetrate the jargon, and even more rarely understand it, the drama of a takeover bid can pass us by.

There are times, however, when a deal assumes such gigantic proportions that it appears to shape the destiny, not just of a company, but a country; when the strategy is so ambitious that it assumes Napoleonic proportions; when the cut and thrust transcends the barriers of the financial pages and becomes an event to enthral us all.

Yesterday the Financial Times described the Royal Bank of Scotland’s successful bid to buy the Dutch banking group ABN Amro for a colossal €71 billion (£49 billion) as “a milestone in the banking industry . . . the largest financial services transaction of all time . . . something many bankers and investors believed was impossible when it was first proposed”. Along with two other members of a banking consortium, RBS has been locked, for the past six months, in a truceless war with its powerful rival, Barclays, ignoring the warnings of commentators and analysts alike who told RBS that it was overpaying, and sticking to its bid through one of the least promising banking periods of our time, as people queued to take their money out of Northern Rock, and the “credit crunch” called into question the very infrastructure of the banking system. Its single-minded approach has paid off. Last week, Barclays bowed out, defeated by the sheer power of RBS’s cash-laden offer, while ABN’s shareholders lined up to accept the inevitable.

There is something atavistic about these mammoth bids, conducted, as they are, like the military campaigns of a previous era, drawing allies, who may no longer be called Prussians or Austro-Hungarians, but are equally powerful in modern terms — forces such as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Rothschild and Lehman Brothers; when the action is this big, everyone wants to be involved.

What gives the narrative added appeal, however, is that this was an enterprise conducted not from the boardrooms of Wall Street or the City of London but from an office in Edinburgh, where a team of ten — four Scots, four Englishmen, and two Americans — headed by a Scottish banker, Sir Fred Goodwin (widely known as “Fred the shred” for his cost-cutting prowess), would be linked every morning by videophone to plan the next stage of its campaign. From the start it was determined to rely on the strength of its bid rather than on public relations. “Others bull****; we do it,” was the word from an insider.

Business journalists covering the story, who were regular visitors to the Barclays headquarters in London, were rarely invited to meet Sir Fred in his fastness on the outskirts of Edinburgh or his office in Bishopsgate. Instead, the tactics were rolled out from RBS headquarters in a step-by-step approach that seemed impervious to the criticisms of the analysts, and the fluctuations of the share price.

This brand of self-confidence is in short supply in Scotland today. A hundred years ago, however, it was typical. “There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make,” wrote J. M. Barrie in What Every Woman Knows. That was in 1908, a time when freebooting capitalism was at its most rapacious, and companies such as Jardine Matheson, its profits swollen by the opium trade, were colonising the Far East, provoking a couple of wars in the process. In those days the entrepreneurialism of men such as Andrew Carnegie was a byword for unbridled ambition and ruthless exploitation (the great philanthropist did not hesitate to call in the military if his workers failed to toe the line). In every country of the empire Scots bestrode the commercial world: “For every Englishman who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external aid, you find ten Scotsmen,” wrote Charles Dilke on a visit to India in the 1860s.

For some reason, that drive and enterprise have been in short supply in recent years. The standard complaint these days is that too many businesses suffer from limited ambition and a failure of nerve. It has been called, derisively, “the Scottish cringe”, but in truth it is not confined to Scotland. Britain as a whole needs more such buccaneering energy. It may be, however, that the gene was simply dormant, and has survived, as genes tend to do, this time in the veins of Sir Fred and his team. Certainly, there is no lack of self-belief here. When you land at Edinburgh airport these days you see a sign saying “Welcome to Edinburgh, home of RBS”, and you drive into town beneath an arch hung with the bank’s logo.

This kind of chutzpah is profoundly un-Scottish — but profoundly welcome. When it comes to success, the more vulgar ostentation, the better.

The bank has pressed on with the deal, against all expectations, not because it is the biggest it has ever pulled off — that was the takeover of NatWest seven years ago — but because it is the most important. It will, when confirmed, transform the bank from an international player into a global force, with a presence in 53 countries round the world. For those who remember the bank less than 20 years ago as a minor provincial operator, and the target itself of various takeover bids, the transformation has been remarkable. With RBS in the lead, Edinburgh has become one of the six top financial centres in Europe, and the national economy has benefited, not just from the growth in this sector, but from the accumulation of companies with their headquarters in the city.

You don’t have to be an ardent capitalist to welcome this kind of success. But there’s no harm in taking a bit of old-fashioned Scottish pride in it. We had rather forgotten what it was like.

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