2 Bits

Martinique's 2 Bits of 1764 belongs to a family of cut and counterstamped coinage that proliferated across the French Caribbean when metropolitan coin supplies were chronically unreliable. Spanish colonial 8 Reales were routinely cut into segments — "bits" — and locally authorized to circulate at assigned values, a pragmatic solution that the colonial administration tolerated rather than designed. The British occupation of Martinique from 1762 to 1763 had only deepened the monetary disorder, and this issue emerged almost immediately after the island's return to France under the Treaty of Paris.