48 Stivers

Ceylon passed to British administration in 1796 after the Dutch East India Company's collapse, but the island's monetary supply remained a chaotic mixture of Dutch colonial issues, local coinage, and imported specie for years afterward. The 48 Stivers was part of a series of emergency countermarked and newly struck pieces authorized to rationalize that mess, bridging Dutch accounting conventions — the stuiver being a Dutch fractional unit — with British colonial administration before sterling coinage eventually displaced the lot.