Collecting African Money in Georgian London: Sarah Sophia Banks and her Collection of Coins

Abstract

Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818) is less well known than her brother, Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society. Like her brother, she was a keen collector, and assembled a substantial collection of printed ephemera, as well as an important numismatic collection. Both these collections were deposited at the British Museum on her death in 1818, and they remain uniquely important resources for scholars of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century collecting. This article looks at one particular part of her collecting — money from Africa — to explore the purpose of Sarah Sophia Banks’ numismatic collection, and the place that material from Africa had in it, during her lifetime, as well as at the British Museum after her death.