VANUATU silver 50 vatu 1994

Description

Vanuatu is a country made of islands east of Australia and New Guinea, southeast from the Solomon Islands, west of Fiji. The people living there are Melanesian-Austronesian, with input from various other human groups, including colonizing Europeans and Asian traders. Europeans fought over them. In the 19th century they ended up as French colonies, called New Hebrides. During World War II British administrators took over from the French after the establishment of the Vichy government in France. The Americans kept the Japanese out. Independence movements gained strength after the War. Several attempts at Independence failed, with occasional armed conflicts, until 1980. The legislative – Prime Minister style of goverment has not produced stable administrations.

Coin collectors tend to be geographically oriented. If they are not patriotically collecting the coins of only their own country, or sentimentally some other country, then perhaps they will collect a region. The Pacific islands that start with Borneo and progress eastward to Hawaii and Easter Island are culturally very varied and spread across an expanse of water three times the size of Asia. Size of these islands ranges from Australia to Nauru. Population of Indonesia 1/4 billion, Tonga100,000. Coins were made in Indonesia1000 years ago if not earlier.

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.