1 Centavo Essai

The 1878 essai coinage for the Dominican Republic was produced in Paris — almost certainly by the Monnaie de Paris, which held a near-monopoly on producing trial and pattern pieces for Latin American and Caribbean states throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Republic had only emerged from Haitian rule in 1844 and spent the following decades in chronic fiscal and political instability, including a brief voluntary reannexation to Spain in the 1860s that ended badly. Whether this essai ever progressed to an approved circulating issue is the more interesting question here.