Brendan Greeley

It's not sterling.

It's Pennsylvania shillings or Maryland shillings.

What starts to happen is they start to devalue their own shillings.

So to attract silver, sometimes literally from pirates of the Caribbean,

into their own ports because that makes, if the silver then can buy more in that port, which means the port can attract more silver.

This is a problem the British Empire eventually recognizes.

But this coin, you see it in newspapers referred to as dollars.

People will offer rewards and won ads for dollars.

Colonies are fighting each other with currency devaluations to try and attract the dollar onto their shores.

So this is by far the dominant form of money, not just in the colonies, but globally.

Oh, yeah, that's what dads do.

It's just a copy.

We didn't get to.

It's the same thing.

So you have copies of copies of copies.

Anybody who has silver or can get some through trade is turning them into something that looks like a dollar and is immediately recognized as a dollar.

So when you look at colonial legislation, you've got catalogs of different kinds of dollars.

You've got a Seville dollar, which meant it was minted at very high quality in Seville.

You've got what they called a Rix dollar, which is produced by the Holy Roman Empire.

Exact same thing.