Introduction: The Accepted History of British Colonial Currency Systems and the Key Questions

Abstract

It might be surprising that anything substantially new can be written about the monetary and financial impact of British imperialism. Yet the standard authoritative works on the British Empire, such as Lawrence James’ (1994) (The rise and fall of the British Empire), Niall Ferguson’s (2002) (Empire: the rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power), Robert Johnson’s (2003) (British Imperialism) and Philippa Levine’s (2007) (The British Empire: sunrise to sunset) do not have a single reference to currency or money in their indexes. The one exception is British Empire, edited by P. J. Marshall (1996) which not only has six references to ‘currencies’ in its index, but a chapter by D.K. Fieldhouse (1996:111) has a box titled ‘Money — an imperial tool?’ This book is effectively an expansion of that one question, tracing the historical evolution of colonial currency systems throughout the British Empire, over a period of some 300 years to the end of the 1950s.