The Coins and Banknotes of Burma

"This is very unusual; it’s a numismatic book called The Coins and Banknotes of Burma. It’s written with incredible passion, and I hate to use the label but these guys have qualities that only belong to trainspotter types. I don’t think any academic could match the deep research of the committed amateur. What it does is trace out the history of all the coins and banknotes issued by Burma, going way back to before colonial rule and right up to 1980. This book was a wonderful source for me of just facts about financial institutions and banking in Burma. Another virtue, though, is that it highlights the fascinating idea that money is just a promise. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The book’s very concerned with facts: like whether the notes were printed well. During the Japanese occupation, much of the paper was of very poor quality, so when the military took over in the 60s and initiated this incredibly Stalinist regime, we suddenly have this issue of (as in East Germany) aluminium coins and things like that. So it’s concerned with physical details, but underlying that is the story of a breakdown of trust. We see Burmese society working when people accept the state, and accept its promises, which have that manifestation in the currency on issue. When that breaks down we have chaos, and that’s more or less what we’ve seen in Burma all the way through. For instance, as the Japanese occupation began to break down towards 1945, we see people no longer willing to work for Japanese ‘occupation rupees’. Suddenly the market is flooded with them, and people use the paper to build chicken coops and don’t even bother to pick them up. So we have that traditional narrative of paper becoming valueless, and we can see that all the way to the present day, where Burma’s currency, the kyat, has moved from being six kyat to the US dollar in about 1970, to 1,000 to the dollar now."