Jamaican pound

Jamaican pound
1 penny of 1937
Denominations
Subunit
1/20	shilling
1/240	penny
Symbol	£
shilling	s
penny	d
Banknotes	5/-, 10/-, £1, £5
Coins	½d, 1d
Demographics
User(s)	Jamaica
Issuance
Central bank	Bank of Jamaica
Website	www.boj.org.jm
This infobox shows the latest status before this currency was rendered obsolete.

The pound was the official currency of Jamaica between 1840 and 1969. It circulated as a mixture of British currency and local issues and was always equal to the British pound. The Jamaican pound was also used by the Cayman Islands and Turks and Caicos Islands.

The history of currency in Jamaica should not be considered in isolation of the wider picture in the British West Indies as a whole. See Currencies of the British West Indies. The peculiar feature about Jamaica was the fact that it was the only British West Indies territory to use special regional issues of the sterling copper coinage. (Exceptions to this are a copper penny issued in the Bahamas in 1806, and also the four pence groat coin which was specially issued for all the British West Indies, and later only for British Guiana.)

The earliest money in Jamaica was Spanish copper coins called maravedíes. This relates to the fact that for nearly four hundred years Spanish dollars, known as pieces of eight were in widespread use on the world's trading routes, including the Caribbean Sea region. However, following the revolutionary wars in Latin America, the source of these silver trade coins dried up. The last Spanish dollar was minted at the Potosi mint in 1825. The United Kingdom had adopted a very successful gold standard in 1821, and so the year 1825 was an opportune time to introduce the British sterling coinage into all the British colonies. An imperial order-in-council was passed in that year for the purposes of facilitating this aim by making sterling coinage legal tender in the colonies at the specified rating of $1 = 4s 4d (One Spanish dollar to four shillings and four pence sterling). As the sterling silver coins were attached to a gold standard, this exchange rate did not realistically represent the value of the silver in the Spanish dollars as compared to the value of the gold in the British gold sovereign, and as such, the order-in-council had the reverse effect in many colonies. It had the effect of actually driving sterling coinage out, rather than encouraging its circulation. Remedial legislation had to be introduced in 1838 so as to change over to the more realistic rating of $1 = 4s 2d. However, in Jamaica, British Honduras, Bermuda, and later in the Bahamas also, the official rating was set aside in favour of what was known as the 'Maccaroni' tradition in which a British shilling, referred to as a 'Maccaroni', was treated as one quarter of a dollar. The common link between these four territories was the Bank of Nova Scotia which brought in the 'Maccaroni' tradition, resulting in the successful introduction of both sterling coinage and sterling accounts. In 1834 silver coins of threepence and three half penny (1½ pence) were introduced, valued at ½ real and ¼ real. The three halfpenny came to be called "quartile" or "quatties." These in particular were used in church collections due to a feeling by the black population that copper coins were inappropriate for that purpose. Hence, they came to be called "Christian quatties".