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VOC duit (copper)

18th century　・　copper　・　18th century　・　West Friesland (this piece 1790)

VOC duit (copper)（obverse）
Rijksmuseum / CC0（Wikimedia Commons）

A small copper coin cut with the monogram of the VOC. This country's reckoning ran at one gulden = twenty stuivers, one stuiver = eight duiten, and the duit was the smallest of those units. Daily shopping turned on the small coins, the stuiver and the duit, and the smallest of them, the duit, became a byword for a trifling sum. Copper bearing the mark of the East India Company crossed the sea and took root in the life of the islands; it went on being used in the Dutch East Indies long after the company was dissolved, and its part ended when the coinage law of the Indies of 1854 decimalised the system and replaced it with the cent. This piece was struck in 1790 in West Friesland.