ABSTRACT
India entered onto the world monetary stage in the nineteenth century in a highly significant way because of the breakdown in the economic relationship between gold and silver. Clearly the decline in the gold price of silver which began in 1873 changed the circumstances entirely, causing Fetter and Gregory to write that 'silver again came into the arena of British economic controversy by the side door of India'. India's economic importance to Britain was obvious enough by this stage. How and why did India ever develop a silver currency? In the early nineteenth century the British tended to believe that India was not yet ready to develop its own banking system, which in turn might be expected to aid the evolution of a credit system. This meant that a circulating coinage was all the more important to monetary integrity in India. By the 1870s other circumstances were beginning to change.
