During the heat of the Coronavirus Pandemic, many institutions -- such as museums -- were forced to reinvent themselves. In line with this trend, The British Museum, a world-renowned institution, teamed up with the Google Cultural Institute to create what they entitled “The Museum of the World” (https://britishmuseum.withgoogle.com). The interactive exposition provides the viewer with a similar degree of autonomy that he or she would experience in person: an individual is able to choose from over one hundred objects organized by date and region. In browsing the exhibit, my attention was drawn to precious metals used for currency, which can serve as a lens to examine the relationship between the metropoles and their respective colonies. Arguably the most important and influential category of commodity to come out of The New World was precious metals, especially gold and silver, which were used for several purposes of which the most prominent was currency. Although many of the metropoles came to rely heavily on the extraction of raw metals from their colonies, long before the discovery of riches at Potosi, countries such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom utilized metals (precious or not) in their respective coinage processes. A review of this online exhibition offers a worthwhile insight into the evolution of currency throughout mainland Europe. An examination of Roman Iron Age coins, Gold Solidus of Justinian, and Gold Pavillon of Phillip IV, accentuates the many uses of metal coins, the centrality of symbolism, and the culturally relative meanings these mediums of exchange frequently assume.

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