oa Money Plurality in the Early Modern Colonial Context. The Case of the Mascarene Islands

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Monetary plurality is a common feature of pre-industrial economies. Yet economic historians struggle with this phenomenon, which standard monetary economics fails to conceive. The subject has recently been touched upon in the case of the Early Modern French Atlantic colonies. This paper aims to describe monetary plurality in the French colonial islands in the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth century but also to present its causes. I argue that the plurality of money in this context came from both the specific features of the colonial economy and colonial monetary policy. More precisely, this study surveys five colonial paper-money issuances between 1766 and 1788.