The Maria Theresa Thaler in Italian Eritrea: The Impact of Colonial Monetary Policies During the First World War

The monetary instability brought by the First World War produced a shortage of currency all over Africa. The conversion of European economic systems to war production forced the Vienna Mint to stop the production of Maria Theresa thalers: silver coins fuelling the regional trade in the Red Sea since the mid-nineteenth century. The shortage of this coin during the war provoked the concern of Italian authorities in the colony of Eritrea that produced an unprecedented number of documents by regional commissioners and bank agents at work to face the crisis. These documents are useful to show how the exceptional monetary policies implemented in the colony at that time had a different impact on different actors: those capable of exploiting regional networks, such as caravan leaders and traders, benefited from speculation in currency exchange and smuggling, while those who were more dependent on the colonial monetary system, such as the ascari (African colonial soldiers), suffered the most. The chapter confirms the importance of the Maria Teresa thaler for the fuelling of regional trade, which represented one of the reasons for the Italian failures in building a colonial monetary system. This case shows that colonial attempts did not produce a swift currency revolution, but rather a non-linear monetary transition in which a multiple-currencies system resisted.