LATVIA, silver 2 lati, 1926

Description

The capital, Riga, was a major economic player in the 16th and 17th centuries. Dominated by Sweden, then by Russia, the modern nation exists today because of the good will of most of its neighbors, and its usefulness to one.

The Baltic nations are ethnically quite complicatedly diverse. With the Latvians, who are almost not the ethnic majority in the country named after them, there seems to be some muted controversy about what other people they are related to. Anyway, the humans go back deep into the neolithic period. Southern people pushed the northern people further north over centuries. Germans evangelized with the sword in medieval times. The capital, Riga, was a major economic player in the 16th and 17th centuries. Dominated by Sweden, then by Russia, the modern nation exists today because of the good will of most of its neighbors, and its usefulness to one.

The political arrangements that resulted in the nations of modern Europe began to emerge out of anarchy starting in the 7th century AD or so. Europe, for our purposes stretches from Greenland to somewhere in Russia. Collectors of Europe would likely include Russia. Collectors of Asia, even though about 2/3 of Russia is in Asia, probably not.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.