1 Cash - Christian V

The Danish East India Company's Tranquebar settlement on the Coromandel Coast was one of Denmark's few genuine footholds in Asian trade, and these small copper cash pieces were struck locally to facilitate petty commerce in a region where tiny-denomination coinage was the engine of daily market life. The Company had held Tranquebar since 1620 under a treaty with the Nayak of Tanjore, but by the 1690s the settlement was chronically underfunded from Copenhagen.

Christian V never set foot anywhere near India. His name on a coin circulating in Tamil markets says everything about how thinly colonial authority was projected across intercontinental distances in the seventeenth century.