Countries vs Currencies

Inspired by the debate over the Austrian Split, I have been mulling the idea of how countries and currencies intersect.

Every coin always belongs to one country or issuing authority, while also belonging to one currency. Sometimes one country can span multiple currencies over time, such as Germany, Brazil or China. Sometimes a currency can span countries, such as the euro or the Austro-Hungarian krone.

By considering each coin's country and currency as separate characteristics, we may solve two problems.

A country can encompass a set of currencies over time. Thus can a nation be broken into different eras and still remain as one distinct place on the map.

Similarly, a currency can be applied to more than one country. This covers multinational currencies as well as instances of historical boundaries, empires expanding or shrinking, puppet states and military occupations.

I will reorganize my own collection, and learn by my own experience whether this is indeed a useful concept for organizing the overlapping regions of time and place.

This goes also for the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway (1814–1905).

Flag:


Same king reigned the two countries, and both had the riksdaler as currency (Swe: riksdaler, Nor: speciedaler) and in 1873 Sweden changed to Krona and in 1875 Norway chahged to Krone.

The design of the coins reminds of each other, with the Swedish king Oscar II on the obverse:
Norway 1 Krone
Sweden 1 Krona

I have been thinking that in the advanced search, just the way there is a list of countries, there could be a list or currencies. I don't think this feature in necessary, but it would occaisionally make searching a tiny bit easier and it would certainly be interesting to compare all the coins from a given year that are '5 centavo' coins for instance

thoughts?

With the advent of the country list reorganization , and the creation of the "issuers / sections" subsets within countries, I am exhuming this old idea of mine.

In my personal spreadsheet, I have a column for country and a newer column for currency. This has been helpful for managing my collection of euros, all from the common nation of The European Union. Also helpful for understanding Latin American countries whom suffer frequent revaluations. Less helpful for older pre-modern coins like dynastic China or ancients. Downright confusing for Eastern Europe where the currency is revalued but the coins are grandfathered from the old system to the new.

These days, I am more focused on two other organizational fronts. First, redefining "continent" by cultural ties rather than by geographic borders. Coins are made by humans for humans, so they should be sorted based on human patterns. My defined continents are the British Crown (which covers any nation that bears the royal effigy, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and all the little islands in every ocean), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Eurozone, Latin America (including Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands), the Islamosphere (predominantly all Muslim majority nations from Morocco to Pakistan), Africa (other than Arab nations), Asia, and Oceania (post-colonial nations off the mainland that do not bear the British effigy, including Guyana). There are so many edge cases and exceptions I haven't even considered yet, but for the most part, I am quite content with these divisions.

Second, what to do when the name of the country on the coin doesn't match the country Krause (or Numista, or Colnect) puts it in. In all cases, I always credit the coin to the country stated on the coin. This is such a simple and logical solution, but it does make it harder to find the coin in these online catalogs. What if I forgot where y'all think the coin should belong? Crud, it's under Curacao instead of Netherlands. I hope the admins don't get too many change requests from people like me trying to "fix" the catalog.