A Rebellious Coin: The Resistive Circulation of Pitjes in Batavia

Small-denomination lead coins called piscis, or pitjes in Dutch records, were a common sight in mid-seventeenth-century Batavia (modern-day Jakarta, Indonesia). They fueled the city's gambling culture and paid for board and lodging in its numerous inns and taverns. Their wide circulation furthermore implied their desirability as a medium of exchange in regional commerce, for Sumatran pepper and enslaved people from Borneo. Existing historiography emphasizes that the monetary policies enacted by the Dutch East India Company (or VOC, for its initials in Dutch) successfully pressed for the replacement of pitjes from Batavia’s economy in response to its inability to control the coin’s circulation. Akin to the sojourning Chinese merchant before them, the VOC had, since the 1630s, used pitjes to cement its position in intra-Asian trade networks. The scheme for this was relatively straightforward: by making Batavia the central manufacturing hub for pitjes, it could control the coin's supply and, by extension, its circulation.

The prevailing argument in the historiography is that the city's economy was sufficiently well integrated into the intra-Asian trade networks to accommodate the replacement of pitjes for the colonially imported copper duit when the price of the prior spiraled out of control in the central decades of the seventeenth century; the introduction of the duit had to provide the Company with a means through which to control market prices. This paper contributes to the existing knowledge on the circulation of small-denomination coins in Southeast Asia during the colonial period by arguing that a discrepancy exists between the theoretical application of the VOC's policy, on which the historiography is built, and its pragmatic enforcement. By examining the records of Batavia's urban institutions, it shows how pitjes resisted their replacement and continued to circulate in and out of Batavia despite the attempts to alter the city's monetary landscape.