History

The Shell Game: Cowrie and Its Demonetisation

For about a thousand years, cowrie shells imported from the Maldives were the everyday money of many parts of India. Around 1800 the East India Company, wanting silver it could spend and a money supply it controlled, stopped accepting cowries for tax, first in Sylhet then Cuttack then everywhere else, and cowrie money withered without any formal ban. The shells lingered in everyday use into the 1840s and 1870s.