Abstract
This essay explores non-monetary uses of money in the Pacific world circa 1800: the ways in which coins were used not as tokens of exchange, but as raw materials for artistic elaboration. Historically, to counterfeit did not necessarily have the negative forgery-falsification connotations that it has today. Counterfeiting could just mean copying; etymologically, counterfeit means ‘to make in opposition or contrast.’ Connecting Mexico to Manila to Canton to Jingdezhen to Alaska to California to Peru, this project considers economically dominated histories of relations between China and the Americas (in which the Americas are a passive source of raw materials for a dominant core power), as well as how cross-cultural appropriations of physical goods allow us to see material culture with greater precision: in particular, the relations of money and ornament.
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