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One of the intriguing monetary situations in the (Pre-Independence) colonies is that, while the colonists were obliged to purchase a great many goods being shipped from England, and expected to pay for these imported goods with genuine English coinage, the English govt had (deliberately, I think) not provided the colonies with enough official currency to go around. As coins minted in England were sent back to England to pay for goods sent from England, the colonies ran out of conventional currency.
This is a major reason behind colonial paper money. Some of it officially represented English units of currency, much as poker chips represent units of money. Some of it actually represented locally produced goods, such as tobacco; there would be paper money that represented, say, 100 pounds of cured tobacco in a particular storehouse, much the way modern checks represent money in a particular bank account. The colonists also made use of foreign (non-Brit) coinage, such as Spanish silver reals, Austrian thalers, and the like.
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