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The East India Company's 1835 Currency Reform, Ian Barrow

2013 New England Association for Asian Studies Conference

This paper examines the East India Company’s 1835 currency reform. The measure created, for the first time, a unified currency within the Company’s Indian territories. Moreover, it stopped the longstanding practices of minting rupees in the Mughal Emperor’s name and solely in Persian, and instead introduced coins that featured the bust of the British King along with the Company’s name and the denomination written in English. Because coins are among the most evident ways states express their sense of self and power, the political effect of the reform was to underscore the decades-long process whereby the Company phased out Mughal …