MALAYSIA EAST INDIA COMPANY 1 cent 1845

Description

The Straits Settlements were acquired by British interests piecemeal over several decades. Administrative duties were not served by a single agency. For a few decades financial aspects were managed by the East India Company, thus its name on the coinage.

Modern Malaysia is a federation of old sultanates with an elected king. The Sultanates came and went for1000 years, some succumbing to Portuguese and then Dutch attacks. In the 19th century the British took over most of the territory of the modern country and began consolidating the central administrative structures.

The big player in East Asia is China, of course. Then there is Japan and Korea, throw in Mongolia. South of China and east of India, but not including, for the most part, the islands to the east, is what we call Southeast Asia. From Burma to Malaya there have been a series of local kingdoms for about 2000 years. Russia, with its Asian Siberia, doesn’t count. We consider it part of Europe.

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.