1 Khumsi - Salah

Mukalla, a port city on the Hadhramaut coast of what is now Yemen, operated under the Qu'aiti sultans whose commercial wealth derived largely from Indian Ocean trade networks and significant remittance flows from the Hadhramaut diaspora in the Dutch East Indies. Local bronze fractions like this khumsi were struck to address the chronic shortage of small change that plagued the Arabian coastal towns throughout the nineteenth century, where Maria Theresa thalers dominated larger transactions but left a practical vacuum at the petty trade level.