How Many Nations Do You Own

You'd have to count Andorra though. There's a chapter of The Banknote Book on notes from there. My software says 204 but that includes notes from eg. Spitsbergen, Memel territory, Liechtenstein and also lists both German Notgeld and Austrian Notgeld as separate "countries". Germany itself comes in three flavours: "Germany" (Weimar republic and 1990-2002), "Bundesrepublik" and " DDR". Then I still have a few notes from German East Africa. If you'd want to discount all of these, probably 190 for me.

But hey: Pick / Krause is history. It's a discontinued product.

@Lighthouse250:

Yes, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Memel and Monaco are Pick-Countries and count therefore, though they had only "Notgeld" (emergency currency) at the time. As well as San Marino, using Mini Assegni as coin replacement in the late 1970'ths.

Spitzbergen or also named Svalbard is not a Pick Country.

In Pick-Terms Germany consisted of German States (mainly pre 1870), Germany, the former West Germany and East Germany. Some other Pick-countries belonging to Germany: German East Africa, German South West Africa, German New Guinea, Kiau Chau, Memel, Danzig, Bohemia & Moravia and Saar.

Yes, the Pick-Catalogues are history but they will still be accompany us for some time.

But congrats. 204 countries build up a massive collection!

By the way. Liechtenstein is an easy country to complete. The had only three pieces of Notgeld.

There are only six nations of todays world who never officially issued some sort of paper money: Kiribati, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Tuvalu. The Marshall Islands are also missing in the Pick Catalogues.

Some others are part of a currency zone or union and could be identified by a letter printed on the banknotes.

My collection is not banknotes-focussed - I have 1039 notes in a numismatic collection of 14208 items - but those notes come from 181 "countries".

Some caveats in the counting:
- There are a couple of Notgeld entities in the list. Not German cities (which are all filed under the country "Zz Notgeld zZ", which isn't included in the country count), but places like Upper Austria and Trieste
- Mexican Revolutionary War states are listed as separate countries; there's at least half a dozen of them.
- Japanese Invasion Money are listed as five separate countries, one for each language/currency region.
- No-longer-existing countries, such as Texas, Netherlands New Guinea and German East Africa, are listed as separate countries. As a main focus of my banknote collection is "countries that never got around to issuing coins" (like Texas), this category is perhaps more over-represented than normal.
- If a country changes name (eg. New Hebrides became Vanuatu), the two names will usually be listed as separate "countries". Exception: if the language on the note is entirely in non-Latin script. Eg. I don't list "Siam" and "Thailand" separately; they're both "Thailand".

I can imagine that the discussion of issuing countries in terms of coins is much wilder. There are many more former states or colonies, obsolete dependencies and micronations issuing coins. This would only be topped in terms of stamps.

Ehm, no. Coins have been around for at least 2000 years longer than stamps :)

It isn't automatic, as it was abused and removed early on in the forum's history. You have to do it manually, by typing [quote] and [/quote], and copy-pasting the text you want to quote and inserting it in between.

Now, as to your questions.


That coins have been around for much, much longer than either stamps or banknotes, means that in the grand scheme of things, there are far far more separate coin-issuing entities. Consider, for example, Europe and particularly Germany and Italy. Prior to the mid-1800s, "Germany" and "Italy" were just geographic regions, filled with dozens even hundreds of tiny independent kingdoms, duchies, principalities etc. Many of these tiny nations disappeared before the invention of stamps or banknotes.

Going back further, we have the hundreds of independent Islamic dynasties throughout the Middle East, none of which readily correlate to any modern country. This extends into India, which was a hodgepodge of kingdoms, protectorates, European exclaves and independent states for much of its history.

Africa and the Americas are somewhat simplified in that they had few if any "native" coinages prior to European colonization, so the issue of where to file pre-colonization coinages doesn't come up.

And, of course, if you go back far enough, the ancient Greek series has thousands of independent city-states, many of which issued coinage. One could argue as to how much these should be considered separate "countries", as the concept of the "country" hadn't been invented yet. But if you went back in time and asked them whether they considered themselves to be independent, they would answer "yes".

So for comparison, my entire collection's country count (given the caveats I mentioned in my previous thread), I currently have a total of 826 coin-issuing entities.

My Khalistan "note"
Khalistan P-NL, BNB # B-NL, 5 Dollars, 1982.
Front: Sikh official and arms
Back: Golden Temple of Amritsar
UNESCO decided NOT to include Golden Temple, Inscription denied 2015
Printer: unknown, probably Canadian printer
The Golden Temple (also known as the Harmandir Sahib, lit.#8201;'abode of God', or the Durb#257;r Sahib, 'exalted court', is a gurdwara located in the city of Amritsar, Punjab, India. It is the preeminent spiritual site of Sikhism.

I have 102 countries in my collection, at the last count.

Heh, about 99% of my notes are from Ireland.