World Silver Coins?

Silver was common coinage metal pre-64 around the world. I still find Canadian silver in regular change. Rarely ever in the US.

WD, I have a bunch or 5 & 10 rappan. 1880-1925. Their appears to be NO market for these. What can you suggest?

Unfortunately, for Switzerland, the silvery coins denominated in "rappen" are all cupronickel (or pure nickel for a few years). Only the coins denominated in francs (or fractions of francs) are silver.

As a general rule, countries with silver mines tended to keep silver in their coinage for longer. Example: Britain and most of the rest of the British Empire dropped silver completely in 1946, while Australia kept silver (at .500 fine) until 1965. Mexico is another country that clung to silver as long as possible for this reason.

Many countries abandoned silver after WWI, and again after WWII. Only countries that were uninvolved or relatively untouched by the war kept silver coinage going. When some countries largely abandoned silver, they kept it only for their "flagship" highest denomination coin (just like the US did with the Kennedy halves). Germany (West), France, Italy and Australia (in 1966) come to mind.

Several countries did not issue silver coinage at all. Communist countries could be counted on to have no silver circulation coinage (the only exception being some very early Soviet Union coinage from the 1930s), though silver can be found in NCLT coins intended to be sold to Western collectors. Ironically, another country to issue no silver coinage in the 20th century is Argentina, the "land of silver".

Sap, do you think that if Argentina adopted silver it would not have its periods of inflation?

Argentina stopped issuing silver coins in 1883. It's inflationary problems didn't start until it decoupled it's currency from foreign currencies (the US dollar and British pound) after the Second World War, and didn't really get very bad until the 1960s, by which time most of the rest of the world had abandoned silver as well. So I don't think not having silver coinage was a cause of inflation.

Nor do I think that they could have avoided the inflation by having a silver circulating coinage. As the Mexicans proved in the 1990s, having circulating silver coinage does not prevent inflation in a modern economy, or even slow it down; it merely causes a coinage shortage when the inflation reaches the point where the coins are worth more as scrap bullion than face value.

Argentina's old silver mines had largely dried up by the mid-1800s, meaning they would have had to import most of the silver for a significant mintage of coins from their neighbours. Argentina's inflation seems to have been largely caused by a combination of it's isolationist anti-foreign-investment attitude coupled with military and industrialist interference in government economic policy. It didn't escalate to hyperinflation until after they lost the Falklands War.

Silver was commonly used in most South African Coins in the early 1892(Zar Era) to 1960(British rule and first Decimal Series), With the second decimal series content switched over to Nickel mostly.
The Silver Content diminished from .925 to .500 over the years.
One must keep in mind that these mintages were very low overall for the early years, from circa 10,000 to a max of 360,000.