If you live on the island of Réunion and you collect coins, you have a problem. In its entire history, Réunion managed to issue about 20 coin types. Collect by date and you get a total of about 100 coins. Boooring! That is, until you start getting interested in what actually circulated. That brings in Spanish colonial silver, French generic colonial coins, French Indian coins, the obsidional 10 livres 1810 for the Iles de France et de Bonaparte, the
Kerveguen counterstamps and some very scarce trade tokens.
If, for good measure, you add in paper money, you end up with a fascinating insight into the problems of an island that could not pay its own way, but had strategic importance to a government that holds "Cartesian logic" in high regard.
This is the premise of the anonymous and undated (1983?) booklet, misleadingly titled
1ère Exposition Numismatique de la Réunion, presumably because it was issued on the occasion of the exposition. It is not a catalogue, but rather a numismatic history of the island, with nice b/w illustrations from the departmental archives and a private collection.
Peter
