Uses of Money in the Early Days of Colonial Brazil: The Coins and their Stories
What history of colonial period Brazil can coins, medals, and decorations tell? Could it tell us more than Official History has offered? What memory can we preserve or rescue? Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in his book Claro Enigma, when referring to memory, tells us that finished things, much more than beautiful, yes, of course, must remain.1 As Drummond’s poem suggests, coins preserve memories, purposes, rescues homelands, physical places, mental places. This small but powerful object that has existed for over two thousand and five hundred years2 emanates power, disseminates intentions, reveals cultures, and identities. These same identities and cultural history that, decoded in the choices of the signs of power (Chartier, 1990: 220), reveal themselves in monetary iconography. For that matter, Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp3 explains that cultural memories need spaces and places to happen, not only physically but also rituals, festivals, commemorative dates, images, and texts. And all these places, all these cultural manifestations, somehow, are displayed in coins, they are in the coins. Jacques Le Goff (2003) also believes that memory is a crucial element of what is understood by identity, whether individual or collective, and the search for identity is one of the essential activities of individuals and society itself.
