Multinationals Make Money in the Third World

For IB academics with a collecting instinct, tokens used in the past by foreign investors in the developing world provide a hobby and research opportunity closely related to their professional interests. Issued to pay workers, function as tallies, and serve other purposes, they provide little-studied testimonies to the monetary, accounting, and security problems of foreign investors primarily in plantation and mining around the turn of the previous century. Many issuers fall under Mira Wilkins’ label of “free-standing multinationals,” the bulk of which have not survived.