ABSTRACT
The recurring problem of currency in late eighteenth-century Jamaica was plagued by frequent shortages, multiple circulating currencies, and clipped or counterfeit coins. A particularly aggravating instance occurred in the early 1770s when a group of Rhode Island merchants dumped large amounts of counterfeit currency in St. Domingue and Jamaica. Though Jamaican merchants initially welcomed the money, this infiltration of counterfeit coins into the economy eventually caused considerable instability on the island. During these years, Governor Sir William Trelawny struggled with the island’s merchants, the Jamaican assembly, and the president of the Board of Trade to arrive at some policy response to the problem but never had authority or power to resolve it himself. The prevalence of clipped or otherwise mutilated or counterfeit coins testified to the unacknowledged economic importance of the enslaved, whose provision grounds and petty trading helped them hold on to some portion of the island’s cash at any time. The practice of currency dumping shows how the “back end” of one system of an imperial economy eager to dispose of its waste products runs up against the “front end” of another, which finds uses even for counterfeit coins, in the less regulated economy of the West Indies.
