As the Spanish were falling, the British were rising. The early British “pound” was quite literally a pound-weight of silver, but the Brits didn’t have a Potosi of their own, and no matter how hard they tried they couldn’t capture anywhere near enough Spanish treasure galleons to back a sizable currency supply. None other than Sir Isaac Newton found a workaround to this problem during his thirty years in charge of the Royal Mint. He initiated a century-plus effort to tap the totality of the British Empire for gold—most notably the territories that today comprise Australia, Canada, South
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