ABSTRACT
Portugal’s adoption of the gold standard in 1854 is noteworthy for several reasons. Portugal was the first country in Europe, after the United Kingdom, to do so. It went against the then current trend which favored either demonetizing gold, as in the case of Holland, Spain or Naples, or a ‘wait and see’ posture while formally continuing with bimetallism, as in the case of France.1 It was a decision taken two decades before the major continental powers began to switch to gold monometallism, during the 1870s, and some thirty years before the onset of what has come to be termed ‘the classical gold standard era’.
