Paisa - Shivaji Satara mint

The Satara mint operated under the authority of the Chhatrapati, the titular sovereign of the Maratha confederacy, even as real power had long since shifted to the Peshwas at Pune. By the late eighteenth century, Satara was effectively a ceremonial seat — the raja kept under close watch, the mint producing copper currency that underwrote local commerce while the political fiction of Chhatrapati supremacy was maintained for legitimacy. The British dissolved that fiction entirely in 1848 when Governor-General Dalhousie annexed Satara under the Doctrine of Lapse, citing the absence of a natural heir.