Did you know you were looking at the coin that anticipated the American dollar and actually gave it its name? So the Dutch philippusdaalder was the forerunner of the dollar? But the Netherlands weren’t that important overseas!
Quite right, but since 1482 Holland was ruled by the Habsburg dynasty and that included Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II. The latter ruled the Netherlands as from 1555 and also acceded to the Spanish throne a year later. In short: Philip of Spain was the most powerful man of the Old and New Worlds. In the Netherlands Philip introduced the philippusdaalder or the Philip taler worth 35 stuiver. And, you may well ask, what has that got to do with the dollar?
The Dutch used the term, daalder (taler) for the Philip taler and for the Spanish 8 real coin (Real de a ocho) which provided them with the silver for striking the coins. The term, daalder returned to the American colonies via the 8 real coin. There the Spanish colonialists called it the ‘dollaro’. So daalder gave ‘dolaro’ and etymologically seen it’s only a tiny step to the dollar. However, it needed quite some patience to wait until the first dollar piece saw the light of day in the United States of America. The first US dollar to leave the mint was in 1794.
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