Santo Domingo's copper coinage of this period emerged from administrative necessity rather than monetary ambition. By 1813, the colony had changed hands repeatedly — ceded to France in 1795, occupied by Haitian forces, retaken by a Spanish expeditionary force in 1809 — and the chronic shortage of small-denomination currency made local copper issues unavoidable. The 1/4 real filled a transactional gap that Spanish metropolitan silver could never reliably supply to a colony this far down the imperial supply chain.
KM#2 is among the scarcest colonial copper issues of the Caribbean, with surviving examples frequently showing irregular flans from rudimentary local production.
Santo Domingo's copper coinage of this period emerged from administrative necessity rather than monetary ambition. By 1813, the colony had changed hands repeatedly — ceded to France in 1795, occupied by Haitian forces, retaken by a Spanish expeditionary force in 1809 — and the chronic shortage of small-denomination currency made local copper issues unavoidable. The 1/4 real filled a transactional gap that Spanish metropolitan silver could never reliably supply to a colony this far down the imperial supply chain.
KM#2 is among the scarcest colonial copper issues of the Caribbean, with surviving examples frequently showing irregular flans from rudimentary local production.