Since 2018, I've been collaborating with Ellen Feingold, the Curator of the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History to digitise the Smithsonian's collection of African currencies. The collection is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world, and includes coins, notes and other objects from across the continent which were used as currency since the early modern period. Together, the objects offer a new perspective on the economic, political and social history of Africa over the last several centuries.
This project started small. I was working on my book on the economic history of Liberia, and approached Ellen to see if I could use digital images of a few of the objects for the chapter on Liberia's monetary history. This included the Kissi penny, a type of iron bar used as currency in the region long before the foundation of Liberia. It also included the first coins issued by the Liberian government after it declared independence in 1847. The intention of these coins, according to Joseph Jenkins Roberts, Liberia's first president, was to facilitate the commercial development of Liberia and to provide a 'stamp of nationality' for the new republic.
While in Liberia doing research for the book, I acquired some recent Liberian dollar notes for the Smithsonian's collection, which Ellen and her team used in a small display on the history of dollarization of Liberia for the New Acquisitions case in the Value of Money exhibition. We wrote a short blog post about this display for the Smithsonian's O Say Can You See blog, which you can see here.
Working with the Liberian material made us reflect on the wider collection of 4,500 African currency objects held by the NNC. At that point, only a small number of these had been digitised and they did not frequently go on display in the museum. Both Ellen and I had done research on African monetary history - Ellen's wonderful piece on counterfeiting is here - so we knew that these objects could tell fascinating stories about the continent's history if we could make them more accessible - particularly to people in Africa, where as far as we know there is no publicly available comparative numismatic collection of similar scale. So we decided to seek funding to see if we could digitise more than just the few Liberian objects I had used in the book.
We started with West Africa, as this was the region with the richest historiography on African money - and also where we had both done previous work. We applied for a grant from the LSE's Knowledge Exchange and Impact (KEI) fund to support the digitisation of the 880 West African currency objects held by the NNC. These included objects ranging from Akan gold weights in the shape of little animals, used to measure gold dust, to contemporary coins and banknotes. Some of the latter referenced earlier currencies, as for example with the depiction of the cowrie on the Ghanaian cedi coin.
The purpose of the KEI fund is to help engage wider audiences with academic research so that the findings of that research might help facilitate change in the public sphere, whether that be in policy or education or cultural heritage. We were awarded a grant to support the digitisation of the West African collection. Most of the money supported the work of Collections Manager Jennifer Gloede, who located the objects, photographed them and worked with us to update the catalogue entries for each object. These often reflected outdated understandings of African monetary systems, and referred to objects like the Kissi penny and Akan gold weights as 'curious' or 'primitive.' We revised these to include more respectful language and more recent understandings of of how African monetary systems worked. As a result of these efforts, open-access images of all 880 West African objects are now available on the Smithsonian's online catalogue for scholars, students and others to use free of charge.
This was a different approach to digitisation than is commonly used, and we think our project provides a useful model for other collaborations between academic historians and public history institutions. Most digitisation projects focus on scale and speed - digitising as many objects as possible in the hopes that people might do research on them. Instead, we used existing research (ours and others) to motivate the digitisation of a small but historically important collection. Through this approach, the digitisation became a vehicle for disseminating academic research to a wider audience. We call this research-led digitisation. We co-authored a short article on this approach for Perspectives on History.
Putting images of objects online may not be enough to make them useful and accessible to non-specialists, who may not know where to start in terms of selecting or contextualising them. To help bridge this gap, we turned to the Smithsonian's Learning Lab platform. Learning Lab is a free platform designed for teachers, and allows users from anywhere in the world to create customised digital collections using objects from the Smithsonian's collection as well as user-supplied content. To begin with, we created a single learning lab which used a small selection of objects from the West African collection to tell the story of the region's monetary history since the early modern period. We then worked with the educators team at the Smithsonian to design a set of three learning labs focusing on areas specifically covered in the 10th grade global history curriculum in Loudoun County, Virginia. These included what money looked like under colonial rule, the way in which it reflected processes of nation building after decolonization, and the impact of World War II.
To engage other historians with our project and with our model of research-led digitisation, we organised a panel at the 2020 American Historical Association on "Digital Collaborations in African History." One of the other panelists was Johan Fourie from Stellenbosch University. After the panel, Johan asked if we would be interested in digitising the South African objects in the collection as part of upcoming celebrations of the centenary of the South African Reserve Bank. Initially, we wanted to include the whole of southern Africa, reflecting the important regional links, but budget cuts during the pandemic forced us to scale back our ambitions. However, we were able to raise money from the LSE's REF Impact Fund to digitize the 679 South African objects in the collection.
We followed the same process as we had with the West African digitisation, but we discovered early on that there was significantly less recent research on the monetary history of Southern Africa compared to West Africa, particularly for the nineteenth century. To help fill this gap, the three of us (Ellen Feingold, Johan Fourie and myself) wrote a paper for a special issue of Economic History of Developing Regions dedicated to the centenary, in which we used a selection of South African objects to explore South Africa's monetary history since the early nineteenth century. Objects ranged from so-called veldpond coins, made in the field during the second Boer War by the fleeing Afrikaner forces who had lost access to the Johannsburg mint, to the first notes with the image of Nelson Mandela issued by the post-apartheid government.
As with the West Africa collection, we wanted this digital collection to be accessible and useful to teachers, particularly teachers in South Africa. As in other countries, school closures during the pandemic made online resources particularly valuable. We hired Amy Rommelspacher, a former schoolteacher and PhD student at Stellenbosch, to use the objects to write a set of lesson plans tailored to South African school curriculum. She did this by using the objects to tell a global history of money from the viewpoint of South Africa. Topics include a broad history of money, the impact of South African gold on the world's monetary system, the Great Depression and money and nation-building under Bretton Woods. In a write-up of the project for the newsletter of the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's Past at Stellenbosch University, Amy noted that "anyone can now view these objects online from the comfort of their own home. I believe that the story of how these objects fit into South African (and world) history present a fantastic opportunity to teach young people the things that they are not currently learning at school."
We have big plans going forward. First, we hope to apply for funds to digitise the remaining 3,000 objects in the collection, covering East, Central and North Africa. Second, we plan to use the history of these objects to tell the long-run story of Africa's monetary geography since the early modern period. By using archival documents and secondary literature to trace where, when and how objects in the collection circulated in Africa, we can show how the impact of globalization, colonialism, decolonization and state-building after independence impacted the uses of different currencies. This will be a major step forward not only for academic research on Africa's monetary history, but also for the wider public's understanding of how African economies have long been connected to each other and to the world.
This project started small. I was working on my book on the economic history of Liberia, and approached Ellen to see if I could use digital images of a few of the objects for the chapter on Liberia's monetary history. This included the Kissi penny, a type of iron bar used as currency in the region long before the foundation of Liberia. It also included the first coins issued by the Liberian government after it declared independence in 1847. The intention of these coins, according to Joseph Jenkins Roberts, Liberia's first president, was to facilitate the commercial development of Liberia and to provide a 'stamp of nationality' for the new republic.
While in Liberia doing research for the book, I acquired some recent Liberian dollar notes for the Smithsonian's collection, which Ellen and her team used in a small display on the history of dollarization of Liberia for the New Acquisitions case in the Value of Money exhibition. We wrote a short blog post about this display for the Smithsonian's O Say Can You See blog, which you can see here.
Working with the Liberian material made us reflect on the wider collection of 4,500 African currency objects held by the NNC. At that point, only a small number of these had been digitised and they did not frequently go on display in the museum. Both Ellen and I had done research on African monetary history - Ellen's wonderful piece on counterfeiting is here - so we knew that these objects could tell fascinating stories about the continent's history if we could make them more accessible - particularly to people in Africa, where as far as we know there is no publicly available comparative numismatic collection of similar scale. So we decided to seek funding to see if we could digitise more than just the few Liberian objects I had used in the book.
We started with West Africa, as this was the region with the richest historiography on African money - and also where we had both done previous work. We applied for a grant from the LSE's Knowledge Exchange and Impact (KEI) fund to support the digitisation of the 880 West African currency objects held by the NNC. These included objects ranging from Akan gold weights in the shape of little animals, used to measure gold dust, to contemporary coins and banknotes. Some of the latter referenced earlier currencies, as for example with the depiction of the cowrie on the Ghanaian cedi coin.
The purpose of the KEI fund is to help engage wider audiences with academic research so that the findings of that research might help facilitate change in the public sphere, whether that be in policy or education or cultural heritage. We were awarded a grant to support the digitisation of the West African collection. Most of the money supported the work of Collections Manager Jennifer Gloede, who located the objects, photographed them and worked with us to update the catalogue entries for each object. These often reflected outdated understandings of African monetary systems, and referred to objects like the Kissi penny and Akan gold weights as 'curious' or 'primitive.' We revised these to include more respectful language and more recent understandings of of how African monetary systems worked. As a result of these efforts, open-access images of all 880 West African objects are now available on the Smithsonian's online catalogue for scholars, students and others to use free of charge.
This was a different approach to digitisation than is commonly used, and we think our project provides a useful model for other collaborations between academic historians and public history institutions. Most digitisation projects focus on scale and speed - digitising as many objects as possible in the hopes that people might do research on them. Instead, we used existing research (ours and others) to motivate the digitisation of a small but historically important collection. Through this approach, the digitisation became a vehicle for disseminating academic research to a wider audience. We call this research-led digitisation. We co-authored a short article on this approach for Perspectives on History.
Putting images of objects online may not be enough to make them useful and accessible to non-specialists, who may not know where to start in terms of selecting or contextualising them. To help bridge this gap, we turned to the Smithsonian's Learning Lab platform. Learning Lab is a free platform designed for teachers, and allows users from anywhere in the world to create customised digital collections using objects from the Smithsonian's collection as well as user-supplied content. To begin with, we created a single learning lab which used a small selection of objects from the West African collection to tell the story of the region's monetary history since the early modern period. We then worked with the educators team at the Smithsonian to design a set of three learning labs focusing on areas specifically covered in the 10th grade global history curriculum in Loudoun County, Virginia. These included what money looked like under colonial rule, the way in which it reflected processes of nation building after decolonization, and the impact of World War II.
To engage other historians with our project and with our model of research-led digitisation, we organised a panel at the 2020 American Historical Association on "Digital Collaborations in African History." One of the other panelists was Johan Fourie from Stellenbosch University. After the panel, Johan asked if we would be interested in digitising the South African objects in the collection as part of upcoming celebrations of the centenary of the South African Reserve Bank. Initially, we wanted to include the whole of southern Africa, reflecting the important regional links, but budget cuts during the pandemic forced us to scale back our ambitions. However, we were able to raise money from the LSE's REF Impact Fund to digitize the 679 South African objects in the collection.
We followed the same process as we had with the West African digitisation, but we discovered early on that there was significantly less recent research on the monetary history of Southern Africa compared to West Africa, particularly for the nineteenth century. To help fill this gap, the three of us (Ellen Feingold, Johan Fourie and myself) wrote a paper for a special issue of Economic History of Developing Regions dedicated to the centenary, in which we used a selection of South African objects to explore South Africa's monetary history since the early nineteenth century. Objects ranged from so-called veldpond coins, made in the field during the second Boer War by the fleeing Afrikaner forces who had lost access to the Johannsburg mint, to the first notes with the image of Nelson Mandela issued by the post-apartheid government.
As with the West Africa collection, we wanted this digital collection to be accessible and useful to teachers, particularly teachers in South Africa. As in other countries, school closures during the pandemic made online resources particularly valuable. We hired Amy Rommelspacher, a former schoolteacher and PhD student at Stellenbosch, to use the objects to write a set of lesson plans tailored to South African school curriculum. She did this by using the objects to tell a global history of money from the viewpoint of South Africa. Topics include a broad history of money, the impact of South African gold on the world's monetary system, the Great Depression and money and nation-building under Bretton Woods. In a write-up of the project for the newsletter of the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's Past at Stellenbosch University, Amy noted that "anyone can now view these objects online from the comfort of their own home. I believe that the story of how these objects fit into South African (and world) history present a fantastic opportunity to teach young people the things that they are not currently learning at school."
We have big plans going forward. First, we hope to apply for funds to digitise the remaining 3,000 objects in the collection, covering East, Central and North Africa. Second, we plan to use the history of these objects to tell the long-run story of Africa's monetary geography since the early modern period. By using archival documents and secondary literature to trace where, when and how objects in the collection circulated in Africa, we can show how the impact of globalization, colonialism, decolonization and state-building after independence impacted the uses of different currencies. This will be a major step forward not only for academic research on Africa's monetary history, but also for the wider public's understanding of how African economies have long been connected to each other and to the world.