DescriptionIn the Marshall Islands they use US dollars. They started making commemorative coins for (mostly American) collectors a few years before independence and continued making them as long as there was a profit to be made.The Marshall Islands are a group of islands in the Pacific ocean in a region called Micronesia. People came from Southeast Asia at least four thousand years ago. They got their name for a British sea captain, John Marshall, in the 1780s. The Germans annexed them as a colony in 1885. They were taken by Japan in World War I and were administered as a “trust territory” until World War II, when they were occupied by the USA. Nuclear tests were carried out on Bikini island in the 1940s-50s. The Americans began preparing them for independence in the 1960s. They became an independent nation in 1991.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, Tonga 100,000. Coins were made in Indonesia 1000 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.
