🏛️ 18th & 19th Century Coins (1700s–1899)

These coins come from a world that no living person remembers. The empires that struck them — British, French, Prussian, Ottoman, Russian — governed most of the earth's surface and printed their authority onto the metal in their subjects' pockets. The denominations are unfamiliar: pfennigs and kreuzers, centesimi and réis, farthings and half-annas. The portraits belong to monarchs whose names appear in history books but whose faces circulated as daily currency.

What survives from the 18th and 19th century survives against the odds. Coins from this era were melted, lost, hoarded, buried, and exported across oceans. The ones that remain carry over a century of patina and the particular weight of metal struck before the modern world existed. The earliest coins in this collection predate the telegraph, the photograph, and the railroad. The latest were struck in the final year of a century that had transformed the planet but had not yet learned what the next one would cost.