Abstract
This paper documents the importance of French Guiana within the Modern World and the influence of this colony, considered as marginal, on the Atlantic trading networks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To reconstruct French Guiana’s commercial network, a material culture analysis of six archaeological collections and records of the boats reaching Cayenne annually during the Ancien Regime were juxtaposed. Through the lens of microhistory, this method led to a revisitation of the Eurocentric economic theories of the Ancien Regime, notably the protectionist policy of l’Exclusif, to better appreciate how the decisions of French Guiana authorities outmaneuvered the imperial power and had a tangible impact on the Atlantic economy by operating outside of the economic precepts of mercantilism.
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