Economic history is typically viewed through broad, macro criteria like gross domestic product, balance of payment and overall employment. This book takes an unconventional, micro approach to economic history. Momentous events and prominent individuals of the past have been captured in coins. Yet hardly anything has been written on what coins can inform of some aspects of the broad, diffused developments in the economy. The book attempts to do so for Singapore of the nineteenth and early twentieth century while casting a brief look at Temasek in the fourteenth century.