Maria Graham and the Politics of Small Change

In 1824 Maria Graham made a suggestion about small change that seems unknown elsewhere in English literature. She claimed rich merchants had conspired with government officials in Chile to suppress the issue of copper coin; profiting a few at the expense of the many. This article discusses that claim, locating it alongside a number of eighteenth and nineteenth century writers subscribing to a similar but more general view: that a complex web of financial self interest surrounded matters of coin issue. Two recent studies both depart from that explanation: Sargent and Velde The Big Problem of Small Change, and Selgin, Good Money. Although these two studies are widely read and influential both deal inadequately with pressures exerted by vested interests. This short article does not purport to explain fully the complex story of coin issue policies in the early modern period. It aims rather to raise questions about whether current scholarship on this topic is out of step, and wrongly so, with the views of those earlier times.