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Currencies of the British West Indies
This article examines the monetary systems that prevailed in the region known as the British West Indies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The territories covered in this article include British Guiana on the South American mainland, British Honduras in Central America, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Jamaica, along with its former dependencies the Cayman Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. It also includes the Eastern Caribbean territories of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, the Windward Islands and the Leeward Islands.
Queen Anne's proclamation of 1704 introduced the gold standard to the British West Indies, putting the West Indies about two hundred years ahead of the East Indies in this respect. Nevertheless, silver pieces of eight continued to form an important portion of the circulating coinage right up until the wake of the great silver devaluation of 1873. In addition to the Spanish dollars and gold doubloons, the British government coined 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16 fractional 'Anchor dollars' in 1822 for use in Mauritius and the British West Indies, but not including Jamaica. The first move to introduce British sterling silver coinage to the colonies came with an imperial order-in-council dated 1825. This move was inspired by a number of factors. The United Kingdom was now operating a very successful gold standard in relation to the gold sovereign that was introduced in 1816, and there was a desire to extend this system to the colonies. In addition to this, there was the fact that the supply of Spanish dollars (pieces of eight) had been cut off as a result of the revolutions in Latin America where most of the Spanish dollars were minted. The last Spanish Dollar was in fact minted at Potosi in 1825. There was now a growing desire to have a stable and steady supply of British shillings everywhere where the British drum was beating. The 1825 order-in-council was largely a failure because it made sterling silver coinage legal tender at the unrealistic rating in relation to the Spanish dollar of $1 = 4 shillings and 4 pence. Remedial legislation was introduced for the British West Indies in 1838 with a new and more realistic rating of $1 = 4s 2d. And from around 1840 until 1955 most of the British West Indies were using sterling coinage. On the outbreak of the second world war, the sterling area was created as a wartime emergency measure in order to protect the external value of sterling. All of the British West Indies territories joined the sterling area in 1939, including even British Honduras which might conceivably have followed the path of Canada and Newfoundland and remained outside of the arrangement.
Despite the use of sterling coinage throughout the British West Indies during this period, there was a mixed usage of sterling accounts and dollar accounts, and there was an eventual move towards dollar accounts in all the territories in conjunction with decimal fractional coinage. This article will chart the circumstances and changes in the individual territories.
==British Honduras==
British Honduras, renamed Belize in 1973, was the first British colony in the Caribbean area to replace the sterling currency with a US dollar based currency. This occurred in 1885 as a result of the fact that the dollar of neighbouring Guatemala had driven the sterling coinage out of circulation. The authorities wanted to return to the gold standard and the choice of the US dollar was influenced by growing trade links with New Orleans in the USA. See the main article entitled the Belize dollar.
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