2 Quartos Robert Keeling

Robert Keeling & Sons operated as a provisioner in Calcutta, and like many private merchants in early nineteenth-century British India, resorted to issuing their own copper tokens when the chronic shortage of small-denomination coinage made everyday commerce nearly impossible. The East India Company's mints were producing rupees and larger silver, but fractional copper for bazaar trade was perpetually inadequate for the volume of transactions the colonial economy demanded.

The Lyall reference places this squarely among the documented Presidency-era merchant tokens catalogued by Robert Lyall in the early twentieth century — a body of material that remains the definitive reference for private Indian trade tokens of this period.