Global currency - before the dollar the thaler

Just finished The Treasures of the Armada by Robert Stenuit, published in 1971. I love maritime history, archaeology and reading about shipwrecks, so quite a find in a Goodwill store. Has an element of the story of the Wasa, in that much museum and library sleuthing took place prior to locating the likely site.

The book is interesting in that it was written and originally published in French and is translated by Francine Barker. You get so accustomed to smoothly written books today, which really means closely edited books. Stenuit has a particular personality that comes through in the writing but there are occasional infelicities of translation that leave you uncertain how much is the author's mildly quirky voice rather than the translator's quirky choices.

It is also full of quirky pieces of information. Stenuit is investigating a particular gold coin which they have recovered from the sea bed. It is unusual and it takes a while for him to discover that it is what he calls a Conrad for the monarch referenced on the obverse side of the coin. Finally, an expert reveals to him:

It was a 'genovinno', minted sometime between 1527 and 1557, modelled on a much older coin which had inspired such confidence in merchants and bankers all over Italy and the rest of Europe that it went on being minted until the eighteenth century.

That's interesting but this is the really fascinating note.

The Conrad in question had long been forgotten (in much the same way as Maria Theresa Austrian thalers are still minted in Vienna for the Yemen, where they are legal tender).

Really? The thaler (which is the origin of the word Dollar) was recently still being minted and it was still legal tender? To Google.

Starting with Wikipedia:

The MTT could also be found throughout the Arab world, especially in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Muscat and Oman, and in India. During the Japanese occupation of Indonesia in World War II, enough people preferred it to the money issued by the occupying forces that the American Office of Strategic Services created counterfeit MTTs for use by resistance forces.[1]

There is an excellent article in Saudi Aramco World, Tales of a Thaler by Peter Harrigan. Some excerpts.

On Tuesday November 5, 2002, the operator of the lever press at the Austrian Mint in Vienna struck the final coin of a two-day minting. The almost 2000 proof coins, their cameo portraits frosted in relief against a mirror-bright background, were packed individually in glassine wrappers. Most of the remaining 12,974 coins, of normal "bright uncirculated" quality, were packed 500 to a burlap bag and prepared for dispatch to banks in Austria and Germany and to overseas coin dealers. The date on the newly struck coins was the same date that had appeared on these coins for 222 years: 1780.

"The mint received several orders from the USA and England that caught us with low stocks, so we had to schedule a striking," says Kerry Tattersall, marketing and sales director of the 800-year-old official national mint of the Republic of Austria. "We are always happy on the infrequent occasions when we mint this coin. It is to us our Aufhangerschild, our shingle, the sign hanging outside our premises. This is our oldest, most traditional and most famous coin in production, and we will never stop striking it."

That coin is the silver Maria Theresa thaler, pronounced tah-ler and known by numismatists and scholars simply as the MTT. Its design, luster and fine detail have earned it a reputation as one of the most beautiful coins in the world. Arabs have referred to it as abu nuqta ("the one with the dots"), abu tayr ("the one with birds") and abu reesh ("the one with feathers"), all allusions to features of its intricate design.

Another name, "Levantine thaler," points to one of the paths of its diffusion, as does the Arab misnomer, riyal fransawi ("French riyal"). The French, less flatteringly, called it "la grosse madame." Only riyal nimsawi ("Austrian riyal") referred both to the coin's true origin and to the fact that Arabs preferred the term riyal—from the Spanish silver real coin—to thaler or dollar.

[snip]

Empress Maria Theresa died in 1780, and MTTs since then have carried that date. By that year, the four Habsburg mints had struck more than 30 million thalers, more than any other coin of the time, with the possible exception of the Spanish dollar. She had literally coined a legacy, one that continued to proliferate beyond anything she herself might have imagined.

The minting records of two and a half centuries are not complete," says Tattersall, who searches for and acquires MTTs for the Austrian Mint's own museum and modestly admits to being a hobby historian with a small private collection. "But I have seen estimates of totals of around 400 million pieces produced from eight Habsburg or Austrian mints and from an additional six mints in Europe and one in Bombay."

By way of ports such as Genoa, Trieste, Livorno and Marseille, the MTTs made their way to Levantine, Egyptian and Red Sea ports along with consignments of metals, mirrors, Bohemian-glass bottles, clothing, trinkets, flint lighters, knives and razors, sealing wax and Leghorn and Florence silks. From trading centers like Suez, Jiddah, Suakin, Mokka and Massawa they diffused further still, re-exported-like many European goods-to the interior of Africa and Arabia and, by way of the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, to India, China and Southeast Asia. And Muslim pilgrims used them, an internationally recognized currency, as they traveled to and from the holy places.

Like a wire closing an electrical circuit, the MTT filled a need. Europe was endlessly interested in the vast and exotic plenty that the Middle East offered: spices, aromatics, coffee, gum Arabic, indigo, mother of pearl, tortoise shells, ostrich feathers, Arabian horses and more. And in Asia and the Arab world, there was an insatiable demand for silver, no small part of it linked to the use of the coin in dowry payments and jewelry.

[snip]

The wide acceptability and inherent bullion value of the MTT made it as valuable in war as in trade, Semple's research reveals. For example, the 1867 expedition in which General Sir Robert Napier led 30,000 soldiers from India into the highlands of Ethiopia, to rescue the British consul and others taken hostage by Emperor Theodore, needed money to purchase supplies as it advanced into the interior, and "the only acceptable currency at the time was the MTT," says Semple. "So an urgent dispatch was sent to the mint in Vienna, and they obliged by minting five million MTTs. The coins were carried on the backs of thousands of mules, horses and elephants, along with munitions and supplies."

From Coins of Colonial Africa.

By the beginning of the 19th century, Maria Theresa thaler had supplanted the Spanish coin in the Mediterranean and the Middle East and became one of the most widely circulated coins on the globe.

The nucleus of its expansion is situated around the Red Sea, were the thaler became prominent in the slave trade and other commercial transactions. The so-called ‘Levantine’ thaler gradually spread across the eastern Mediterranean into Arabia, along both shores of the Red Sea, around the Horn of Africa, into present day Ethiopia and Eritrea and down the coast of East Africa as far as Lourenço Marques, the Portuguese port now called Maputo in southern Mozambique, and the islands of Zanzibar and Madagascar. It crossed the Sahara from the Maghrib, and reached into Java, and as Far East as China. To the west, it went inland until Congo and Angola. It crossed the Atlantic and was known, though not as widely used, in both North and South America. In countries that had no currency of their own, such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Ethiopia, the thaler survived well into the last century as late as the 1970s in Muscat and Oman. The Maria Theresa thaler was the first coin to gain major acceptance among the African populations. The rise, circulation and widespread appeal of the thaler at a time of shifting borders made it a remarkable early example of international money.

[snip]

In Ethiopia, a variety of thaler were in circulation in the nineteenth century and the Maria Theresa thaler was called ‘sett berr’ or ‘woman dollar’. The less popular ‘wand berr’ or ‘man dollar’ (portraying Austrian Emperors) traded at as much as a 25% discount. Defective or suspicious looking Maria Theresa thalers also brought less. A new one, or one that is much worn or one on which the ornaments of the neck, especially the points of the star, are not clear, is at once rejected.

In spite of some resistance to it, as the 19th century progressed, the Maria Theresa thaler became gradually entrenched in Ethiopia, making Ethiopia the thaler’s homeland in Africa. The Italians made even greater use of the Maria Theresa thaler as they were establishing their African colonial empire. In order to finance Italy’s exploits, production at Vienna Mint soared from 468,050 thalers minted in 1890 to a record 6,455,600 in 1896, the year of the ignominious defeat of the Italians at the battle of Adowa.

In 1935, the Italians purchased the Thaler dies, presses and other minting equipment from Austria and began striking the thalers themselves. In just three years, Italy produced, in order to finance the invasion of Ethiopia, 18,000,000 thalers for the use in Italian East Africa.

From that article comes this map of the area of Thaler circulation.

Just fascinating. A coin first minted in 1741 spreads across much the trading world, continues to be minted up till today and was still official currency in a number of countries around the Arabian Peninsula as recently as the 1970s.