COLONIAL HISTORY IN YOUR HANDS
Foreword by John Kraljevich
(John Kraljevich’s foreword). It’s sort of a tall order to ask someone to work hard to engage in a hobby. I suppose most recreations require some combination of effort and skill, whether they involve a paddleboard or a palette. But after a while those diversions enable their practitioners to find some effortless space where the fun is cheap, the labor light, the imaginative expanding of horizons requiring no less effort than the initial attempts and never more.
God bless the folks who collect colonial coins, because this hobby isn’t anything like that. Buying a few is easy enough, and pretty much anyone can wrap their head around a piece of paper money printed by the Continental Congress, or a shilling struck by the generation that followed the Pilgrims, or a medal struck to honor George Washington. The connection those objects create between their owner and historical moments that are meaningful to any sixth grader are a sugar high, an enjoyable energy that on its own doesn’t evoke any deeper understanding. This doesn’t make them bad or valueless, of course. Instead, in a small proportion of hobbyists, it creates a deeper yearning for both the objects and a wider range of historical moments. And the dragon those hearty collectors chase is more connections, more shared energy between our past and our present, and an understanding of the past that is as emotional as it is academic.
There aren’t many folks willing to put in the work to get to a Jedi-level appreciation of the interconnections that our numismatic collectibles imply to a novice and prove to an expert. Dr. Peter Jones always has. He takes notes like a student intent on an A and asks questions with the rapid-fire urgency of a would-be Plato encountering a just-poisoned Socrates. Every answer creates a follow-up. Every follow-up induces a healthy nod. And all those nods, and the silent thoughts that accompanied them, have manifested in the work in front of you now.
Maybe it takes someone from the other side of the Atlantic to realize that any conception of a colonial American economy on its own is like imagining the independent locomotion of a fender down a highway. Modern historians call this understanding “vast early America” or “the Atlantic World”. This underscored the mercantilist relationship between the hemispheres, the connections of Africa and the Caribbean to the American mainland, and the small-world unity that past historians and numismatists have ignored by cleaving intercontinental divisions into an economic system that had none. Peter’s work incorporates the coins made here and those made abroad that came here with an expert’s understanding of the colonial systems that deposited strange pocket mates together in early American purses. He honors that diversity by bringing those objects together in a single collection and those stories together between a single set of covers.
In short, Peter gets it. He gets that the history is why we collect these things. He gets that numismatists composing lists have edited economic history into a form that would have been unrecognizable to the actors in the colonial economy. He gets that paper and coins go together, that coins and medals go together, and that the effort to master the obscurata repays a hobbyist dividends in a most satisfying fashion. His book draws all of this higher-level understanding together in a way that will reward the beginner and also please those more advanced. It will help you appreciate your own coins more and make you want to go get more, including some you may never have considered before.
I’ve been honored by Peter’s friendship for something close to two decades, and my own skill as a numismatist has been improved by his inquisitive nature. I’ve learned from him and I’ve learned more from this book. Read carefully and you will too — but take Peter’s example as you do. The questions that come to mind as you learn might take work to answer, but the answers yielded by well-formed questions are the most satisfying of all.
600 pages, profusely illustrated with color photos
300 full-page color coin photographs
hardback 8.5 by 11 inches
copyright 2020
price $149 at BookBaby, apply code SIXTY OFF to get it for $89