‘Circulation’ is a popular way to describe how money works. One metaphor suggests that money irrigates economies as water irrigates land. This metaphor is so popular that someone even built a machine to illustrate the flow of money. If you ever happen to be in the city of Wellington, you can visit the MONIAC machine on display at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

In this part, our three contributors press you to consider deeper meanings circulated by coins, banknotes and other financial assets. Catherine Comyn (Chapter 4) gets right to the heart of matters in ‘Te Peeke o Aotearoa’, rereading New Zealand's colonial history to unearth a paradox beneath the idea of money as circulation. We think of money, especially cash, as something that circulates easily and widely. But in colonial New Zealand cash was not the medium of exchange for the Indigenous Māori populations; it was not how they circulated value. For the Māori, value was held in land; every parcel of land represented complex, interrelated layers of value. Yet land stays put; it cannot circulate like water. For colonizers, this dilemma was easily solved by asserting property rights, as stipulated by English common law. This allowed land to circulate in asset form. New Zealand is just one location in the former British empire where Indigenous populations were forcibly separated from their land through the aggressive use of English law. Thereafter, Indigenous populations were frequently ‘brought into circulation’ as financial citizens through the imposition of entrenched cycles of debt. Comyn shines the spotlight on a little-known and short-lived Māori currency, an important symbol of Māori political activism, which helped circulate resistance to colonial power. Traces of these Māori banknotes still rest in a museum, whispering their ghostly message of resistance to whoever might listen.

Ashley Cordes (Chapter 5) engages in an equally important revisionist history project, this time highlighting the Coquille nation in Oregon, US. Like Comyn (Chapter 4), Cordes explores a painful history of settler colonialism, an ideology that seeks to replace original populations with a new society of settlers. In ‘Both Sides of the Coin’, Cordes examines coinage struck in the 1850s, featuring iconography of Lady Liberty, represented first in Greco-Roman form. A year later, the colonial coins were restruck to feature Lady Liberty framed as an ‘Indian princess’, culturally appropriating a feather headdress. Cordes traces how early coinage across settler America circulated colonial fantasies of bravery and superiority, ideas of American nationhood, myths of the American dream and economic success through enslavement. Yet the iconography on these coins masked brutal genocides, stolen lands, broken treaties and debts owed to indigenous American peoples.

Syahirah Abdul Rahman (Chapter 6) dissects the colonial extraction and circulation of the mineral ore tin, a circulation of finance capital that haunts Malaysia to this today. Rahman's contribution is simply entitled ‘Milo’. The name will conjure up happy memories for those who grew up with this milky chocolate ready-mix drink, sold in highly recognizable green tins across the Global South. Here, Rahman gets us to think about ‘circuits of capital’, a concept made famous by Karl Marx (1885/2014) when analysing the dynamic movement of value in capitalist production. Abdul Rahman uses the Milo tin to weave together her discussion of Malaysia's ongoing position in postcolonial circuits of capital. A straightforward economic analysis might simply have traced Malaysian tin from its extraction as mining ore using Indigenous labour, to Malaysia's role in a complex circuit of global and regional trade and investment. However, Rahman digs far deeper, tackling British colonialism head on, to reveal the uncomfortable haunting of Britain's harmful, far-reaching policies of racial capitalism.

The notion of racial capitalism as an analytical framework is often traced to Cedric Robinson in his ground-breaking work ‘Black Marxism’ in 1983. Other authors, including Gargi Bhattacharyya (2020), a contributor to this volume, use the term racial capitalism to explain the role racism has played in enabling key moments of capitalist development. This includes capitalism's coercion of people to participate in economic arrangements that consign them to the social margins. Abdul Rahman explores the coercion of the Malay population into the arduous extraction of tin from colonial Malaysian mines for trade throughout Britain's empire. Rahman then shows how Malays were repeatedly kept out of ‘circulation’, denied full financial citizenship through restricted education, social mobility and access to investment markets. She further highlights the momentary circulation of Malaysian nationhood and self-reliance through its creation of the Proton automobile. The Proton and other icons highlighted in these three chapters no longer circulate the same meanings, but we can learn so much from them.