Brendan Greeley

If you multiply it by eight, there's a happy accident, which is that it's almost exactly the same weight and size as the Joachimsthaler.

So pieces of eight that we know from pirate movies, right?

That's what that was.

The pirate movies piece of eight is named because the Joachimsthaler was the dominant form of silver and Spain had to copy it.

So you have this global flow of silver already.

The Spanish in the late 1570s develop a way to send galleons straight from the Mexican coast to Manila.

So you've got this flow of silver that's going straight to China.

It's going through Seville and into Europe.

It's also making its way to China.

China is sort of absorbing all the silver in the world eventually.

It all takes the form of this dollar.

In English, it's known as the dollar.

Unambiguous.

Very clear what it is.

So the colonies are also stuck on the edge of this flow.

And what you get is actually weird currency devaluations among the colonies.

So to get to the Alexander Hamilton point, I think I'm going to wrap this up.

I think I maybe did it in seven minutes.

You end up with the colonies have got their own forms of shilling based book credits.

They're separate currencies from what the British have.