The Currencies of the Hindu States of Rajputana

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The author, who was posted as Surgeon Captain in the Indian Medical Service, Bengal Army, in his leisure hours during the years spent on duty at the courts of Udaipur and Bikaner, devoted his attention to the subject of coinage in the native states of Rajputana. The amount of local coins circulating in the Rajput states was very large, almost the collection of a century. The coins were fashioned in a crude way with a hammer and anvil and had plain unmilled edges. Stamping was carried out in a similarly rough manner - one workman holding the piece of metal between two dyes, while another workman with a blow from a heavy hammer completed the coin. Gold, silver and copper coins were minted. Some of these mints were later closed down due to an order of the British Indian government in 1870. However some rupee coins were given permission to continue. The book covers the history of the coins of Mewar, Dungarpur, Marwar, Jhalawar, Alwar, Bharatpur, etc.

William Wilfrid Webb was Surgeon Captain in the Indian Medical Service with Bengal Army.

Is my leisure time, during the years spent on duty at the Courts of Udaipur and Bikaner, I devoted my attention to the subject of the coinage in the Native States of Rajputana. The information (derived from personal observation, from the study of my unique collection of coins of the Province, from correspondence with brother-officers serving under the Indian Foreign Office, and with many friends among the Princes and the officials at their Courts) I have during my furlough embodied into the following work, which I now venture to offer to Government as, perhaps, a more perfect representation of the questions involved than is at present possessed, and in the hope that a further consideration of the points to which I have endeavoured to call attention may be productive of good to the inhabitants of the large tract of country, the circulating mediums of which are here considered. I may add that the country in which the coins here treated of are circulating, has an area of about 126,000 square miles. In 1891 it had a population of nearly 12,000,000, and at the present rate of exchange the revenues of its Princes alone amount to over two millions sterling.