Mints, Money, and the East India Company’s Sphere of “General Circulation”

This article presents a view of the monetary world of South Asia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, this region was a patchwork of polities that included an expanding East India Company. A dense sarrafi (banking) network extended into oceanic and land trade routes outside the subcontinent correlated to a lively circulation of monetary media and financial instruments across the region. Juxtaposing colonial and non-colonial archives, this article uses three mints as a prism to view monetary practices and governance: the mints of Benares, Calcutta, and Baroda. These mints demonstrate how the mint in South Asia moved from the Mughal imperial household to the post-Mughal bazaar, and then from the bazaar to the colonial government bureau. The article raises new questions about monetary jurisdictions while viewing these jurisdictions as spatial and conceptual claims by states and sarrafs.