SLAVE MONEY

Taranaki Daily News, 2 December 1933, Page 10 (Supplement)

SLAVE MONEY

ODD SCRAP OF NEWS. COIN WITH AN IGNOBLE HISTORY. From Vienna comes news of a strange scrap of history coming to an end. The Austrian Mint, after 150 years, will coin no more Maria Theresa dollars for use in Africa and the Near East. It ■has an ugly side to Its history, handsome as this coinage is, for it was the main currency used for the slave trade. For these i great coins, with their image of an empress, men and women were bought and sold into slavery, and no man knows what an ocean of misery lies behind them. How is it that Austria, which had no colonies even in her great Imperial days, provided > coinage in silver dollars as the ordinary hand-to-hand currency for the various kingdoms of Arabia; for Abyssinia, one of the oldest kingdoms in the world; for the. Afghans; for many parts of India; arid even for the tribesmen of distant Mongolia ? Nobody quite knows. But these great coins, like miniature, cartwheels, always dated 1783, have been supplied by the Mint in Vienna ever since the days of the Empress Maria Theresa. HIT BY THE DEPRESSION. When no other coinage was acceptable these ran current over thousands of miles. There was always a demand for them, and when the war years interrupted the issue they were at a premium. Now the hooded kings in Arabia are coining their own money tokens, and have forbidden the handsome Austrian dollar to circulate. The tribesmen of Northern Africa have become used to the paper money of France and Spain, Zanzibar has British coinage. Mongolia lias Chinese and Japanese. Even in Abyssinia, where progress moves slowly indeed, there is now a national coin. Yet the experts in Vienn- are convinced that it is not modernity which has caused the demand of the African and Oriental money-brokers for the Maria Theresa dollar to fall away. It is simply, they maintain, that the depression has bit these distant parts so hard that they cannot afford to buy Maria Theresa dollars any more.

Thus passes a strange and picturesque episode in the history of money.