Assurer les colonies, dominer les territoires. L’extraversion du marché assurantiel aux Antilles françaises (1840-2024)

This study traces two centuries of property insurance history in the French Antilles (1840-2024) and examines a paradox: how do these territories, the most exposed to natural disasters in the French Republic, remain structurally underinsured? The analysis reveals three structural dynamics. First, a logic of radical extraversion: British domination until 1940, followed by capture by French metropolitan groups, without any lasting emergence of local actors. Second, the systematic failure of local insurance autonomy attempts (1861-1910), crystallizing tensions between centralizing imperial logics and Creole aspirations. Third, the contemporary persistence of massive non-insurance despite the apparent normalization of supply. This paradox does not result from technical inadequacy but from a structural gap between an imported insurance model and Antillean realities: poverty, alternative solidarities, and exclusionary insurance practices. The article demonstrates that uninsurability is not a natural condition but a historical and political construction, revealing continuities between colonial domination and post-colonial dependencies. Insurance thus appears as a governmentality device defining who deserves protection and who can be abandoned to their vulnerability.