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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;The Eidolon, post: 3671244, member: 102103&quot;]I suspect many foreign coins were commonly used in world trade when they were still contemporary, especially gold and silver coins from precious metal producing countries.&nbsp; Silver was pretty much a universally accepted currency so it didn&#039;t matter very much in which country a coin was minted.</p><p><br /></p><p>Low-valued coins were probably less likely to circulate except locally as they weren&#039;t value dense enough to ship across the oceans in bulk.&nbsp; Thus &quot;backwater&quot; colonies like Ireland and Canada a couple hundred years ago probably had more acute shortages of small change, and were more likely to resort to local copper tokens.&nbsp; Some immigrants would bring a small amount of coins with them when moving overseas.&nbsp; In the old Chinese laborer camps in California one of my metal detecting friends has said you can sometimes find Qing Dynasty coppers and, if you are lucky, silver coins and ingots if you know where to look.&nbsp; (Of course, she wouldn&#039;t share where to look!)</p><p><br /></p><p>As for world coins in coin shops now days, it seems to me that many of them were collected over a lifetime in the country of origin of an immigrant, brought overseas in recent times, and then sold to a coin shop directly or indirectly.&nbsp; A lot of world coins show up as collections at estate sales.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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