New Zealand
New Zealand had no coinage of its own before annexation in 1840, and very little afterwards. In the Bay of Islands of the 1820s and 1830s the working currency was barter — muskets, blankets, iron tools, tobacco and pigs — while missionaries and traders kept their books in sterling as a money of account, settling by bill on London, by Spanish dollars off the whaling ships, or by goods from the station store. Sterling became the colony’s legal money after 1840, but specie stayed scarce and payment in kind persisted for decades. What survives is unusually concentrated, because a literate mission and a colonial administration arrived almost together: the documentary record starts abruptly, with Church Missionary Society station accounts, the Paihia press day-books, land-company survey papers and a newspaper run from 1839, nearly all of it now digitised. The imbalance those papers expose is itself the interest. The earliest priced work is printing and surveying, while the far older and far greater tradition of Māori design was commissioned through gift, obligation and utu, and left no invoices.
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