DescriptionJamaica was inhabited by Arawak and Taino people for several thousand years. When Columbus arrived in 1494 he found the natives to be reasonably peaceful and welcoming. He proceeded to terrorize them and steal their stuff, a regime continued by other Spanish agents. Most of the natives died of disease. The Spanish brought in a lot of slaves from Africa to work the plantations they built after they gave up on finding the gold they really wanted. The English kicked them out in 1655 and took their infrastructure. The English continued conducting a slave regime until 1838, when they switched over to a wage labor system and imported workers from India and China. By 1960 they realized that the business did not pay. In 1962 they cut Jamaica loose and let it be independentThe North America category: the big three, the Central American nations, and a bunch of island nations and other political entities in the Caribbean Sea. Greenland we’re putting with Europe. By that criterion we should put Martinique and Aruba with Europe too, but we’re not. I’m not even sure why. Doesn’t matter anyway. Almost all of you are searching for modern coins by country, not by region.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.
