Basel's thalers of this period circulated widely beyond the city's own walls — the Swiss Confederation had no unified coinage, and individual cantons and city-states each struck their own silver to fill the gap. By the mid-eighteenth century, Basel's commercial position on the Rhine made its currency acceptable across a broad stretch of the upper Rhine valley and into the adjacent German territories. HMZ 2#99f places this among a tightly sequenced series of Basel thalers differentiated primarily by die variation in the shield quartering and minor legend spacing.
Basel's thalers of this period circulated widely beyond the city's own walls — the Swiss Confederation had no unified coinage, and individual cantons and city-states each struck their own silver to fill the gap. By the mid-eighteenth century, Basel's commercial position on the Rhine made its currency acceptable across a broad stretch of the upper Rhine valley and into the adjacent German territories. HMZ 2#99f places this among a tightly sequenced series of Basel thalers differentiated primarily by die variation in the shield quartering and minor legend spacing.