¼ Guilder – Demerara and Essequibo

In 1816, the colonies of Demerara and Essequibo (officially united as the colony of Demerara-Essequibo since 1812) operated within a complex and chronically deficient currency system. As British possessions acquired from the Dutch, they inherited and continued to suffer from a severe shortage of official coinage. The local economy, dominated by a booming sugar plantation system reliant on enslaved African labour, struggled with a jumble of circulating mediums. These included limited British silver coins, older Spanish dollars and bits (pieces of eight cut into segments), and a heavy reliance on unreliable paper money issued by local merchants and planters.

This scarcity of sound currency was exacerbated by the colony's position within the wider Atlantic economy. Specie was constantly drained away to pay for imported goods from Britain and North America, leaving the local system perpetually starved of hard cash. Consequently, the value and acceptability of the various paper notes and foreign coins were unstable, leading to frequent disputes in transactions, confusion over exchange rates, and general hindrance to commerce beyond the largest plantation houses.

The situation placed significant strain on daily economic life for all inhabitants, from merchants to freed people, but most acutely on the enslaved majority. Their internal market activities, which involved selling small surpluses from provision grounds, were conducted with a fragile system of credit, barter, and low-value coins. This monetary instability was a persistent grievance among the white and free coloured populations and represented one of the many underlying tensions within the colony, which would erupt in the large-scale enslaved rebellion of 1823.