Trading Dollars: Competing Interests, Monetary Sovereignty, and the Trade Dollar in the Late-Nineteenth Century United States
The United States issued the Trade Dollar between 1873 and 1885. The late nineteenth century saw the United States becoming increasingly more competitive in global trade. Congress intended for the new coin, which was expressly struck with .900 grams (or 420 grains) silver, to replace the silver dollar, which it demonetized in 1873, as American merchants’ silver coin of choice while trading in East Asia. Most Trade Dollars, however, instead ended up circulating domestically. Historians of American money and the state have seldom studied the Trade Dollar, its intended functional and geostrategic purposes, the precise manner of its use, its relationship to the demonetization of silver dollars, or U.S. participation in the Paris monetary conferences between 1868 and 1892. This paper places high global negotiations and empire building in context, together with grassroots domestic politics, local mining and farming interests, and money’s materiality. It argues that a global competition to control the flow of silver met its match in American monetary politics of the late nineteenth century. This collision of business interests and social aspirations created the most prominent political movement related to the American money question and left hopes for a multinational monetary system unfulfilled until the establishment of the Eurozone.
