1 Pound - Elizabeth II French Trade Dollar

The French Trade Dollar was struck from the 1860s onward to compete with the Mexican peso and Spanish colonial reales dominating commerce across Southeast Asia and the China coast. France never fully displaced those incumbents — the Piastre de Commerce remained a secondary player in the treaty ports — but it circulated widely enough in Indochina to become the monetary backbone of French colonial administration there for decades.

This 2020 East India Company issue restrike draws on that mercantile history. The KM# 137 attribution places it within the EIC's modern bullion program, which has leaned heavily on 19th-century trade coinage as its organizing theme.