User:ThreeDrunkenLeopards

For a short period in May 2024, I edited as Specialrequestaccount. Here's the story,

Around the World in Eighty Days by French author Jules Verne

This fiction took place over the winter of 1872/73, and the main character Phileas Fogg set out from London with a carrier bag containing £20,000 sterling, in Bank of England banknotes. Although in his journey around the world, Fogg passed through many parts of the British Empire, he didn't pass through a single part of it that actually used the pound sterling currency as its main unit of account, but this seems to have presented him with few problems. Fogg sailed from Brindisi in Italy to the Suez Canal, and meanwhile Egypt hadn't as yet come fully under British control and was using the Egyptian piastre, which was valued at 97.5 piastres to the pound sterling. As Fogg emerged into the Red Sea, on his left would have been the Hejaz, still part of the Ottoman Empire, and which would have been using the Ottoman piastre, which had split from the Egyptian piastre in 1844. On arriving in the Aden colony, the currency would have been Indian rupees, and this would naturally have also been the currency as Fogg travelled through India to the Bay of Bengal. From the Straits Settlements through Hong Kong, China, and Japan, the currency would have been the Mexican dollar, or its derivatives such as the Hong Kong silver dollar coin of 1866, and the Japanese yen, which at that time were all at parity with the US dollar. It wasn't until the Panic of 1873 that a devaluation in silver caused the United States and Canadian units to appreciate against the dollars in Asia and Latin America. Meanwhile, as Fogg crossed the USA, the currency would have been the US dollar. The British pound sterling, even before the American revolution, never really took root in the North American colonies. Pounds, shillings, and pence were used for colonial government accounts, but they seldom formed any part of the circulating coinage. The main coin in the British North American colonies was the Spanish dollar, arising from illicit trade with the West Indies, and this coin was the parent coin of all the dollars mentioned above. It was the basis of the newly establish US dollar in 1792.