Musings On Why Americans Don't Collect World (Foreign) Coins

I was posting in the recent "Numismatic Demographics" thread when something occurred to me, and I didn't want to derail that thread with these musings over there. So here we go...

It is well known, both inside America and among numismatists elsewhere in the world, that American coin collectors are highly parochial - they tend to only collect American coins. This is of course a generalization, but nevertheless seems to be proven out by the data. Just look at the floorplan of any major national coin show, and see the tiny proportion of the show that's been allocated to non-US coins. Indeed, the term "darksider" (meaning world/foreign coin collector) was coined by American collectors themselves a couple of decades ago on the coin forums specifically because of the unusual-ness of collecting non-US coins, with the observation that "most American coin collectors know more about the dark side of the Moon than they know about foreign coins".

Now, it must be said that this can probably be said of pretty much every country: most coin collectors within that country are probably going to be most interested in their own country's coins. But America seems to have taken this basic principle to an extreme level.

So the question might well be asked: why? What makes America different?

As a non-American observer, it would be easy to jump to the old trope, "it's just Americans being Americans". But I do think there's a deeper explanation at work than just regular American exceptionalism.

I was watching a YouTube video the other day, posted by a European who now lived in America. They pointed out that, in terms of travelling overseas, Americans seemed to be far less likely to visit or live in another country than your average European. Most Americans they'd met had simply never been to any other country. And this YouTuber wondered why, since most of these Americans were wealthy enough to be able to afford to travel overseas if they wanted to. Then they came up with an answer I had never considered before.

America is a very large country. And a very diverse one, both culturally and geographically. If you want to experience "another culture", it's very easy to simply go to a different part of the US, and experience a very different culture. If someone from Minnesota wanted to experience a warm beach, or tropical swamp, or desert, or majestic snowy mountains, they could do so quite easily without even leaving the mainland 48 states. All the exotic-ness you could want, without ever crossing an international border and the accompanying "culture shock" that international travel normally brings.

Compare this with, say, England. If an Englishman wants to experience any of those aforementioned climates in England, they're out of luck, because England doesn't have them. So they're used to tripping off to Spain or the south of France for a holiday in the sun, or a trip to the Swiss Alps for a bit of skiing. It's become normalized.

The same can be said for anywhere else in Europe, or even a place like Australia, which is much the same size as the US but is much more culturally and geographically homogenous.

So, what does this have to do with coin collecting?

As I pointed out in that demographics thread, most coin collectors have historically "got their spark" - the thing that kicked them off in coin collecting - from seeing an unusual coin, and then finding a few more, and a few more, to encourage the spark and start a flame going. That could either be some old obsolete coins from their own country, or it could be foreign coins, thus giving rise to the two different kinds of collector. And if you're in Europe, or Australia, or Asia, then you've probably got a pretty good chance of encountering foreign coins.

But if you're in a country like America, which sees relatively little overseas travel, that exposure to foreign coins is going to be very limited. If you won't go overseas yourself, and your friends and family probably won't either, then your chances of actually encountering any foreign coins are actually quite low. So, many of the people who might theoretically have become world coin collectors simply don't, because they can't - they just never see any of those foreign coins that people in the rest of the world are routinely exposed to.

So, that's my hypothesis. Any opinions?