The panel moves chronologically, taking case studies from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria from the interwar period to the 1950s. The first paper looks at 1930s colonial archives on money in Tunisia. It examines French concerns around currency trafficking and counterfeit money circulating across the Tunisian Protectorate, in order to uncover modes of governing through money. In particular, the paper argues that the policing of money, its form and its circulation, helps reveal French anxieties about the limits of their rule. The second essay uses colonial press sources to study cannabis and tobacco trafficking in the 1930s Moroccan protectorate. French officials established a monopoly system over the two commodities, but a black market arose in response. An examination of two French newspapers reveals their role in casting contrabandists as public enemies and police forces as noble protectors of settler society. The next paper moves to Algeria, examining connected histories of policing the black market in Marseille and Algiers during World War II. Challenging the official police narrative, the paper examines how discriminatory practices narrowly focused police energy on North African traffickers, rather than combatting the true scope of the black market. The final paper turns to the Mayors of Oran and Algiers and their surreptitious attempts to force the merger of the European and Muslim welfare bureaus in their cities. While lauding the order to merge both bureaus as a benevolent measure promoting equality between both communities, the mayors were actually in favor of the mergers as a way to suppress Algerians' electoral gains and the rise of Algerian nationalism in their cities. This paper highlights the consequences of the merger for impoverished Muslims, the employees of the Muslim welfare bureau, and Algerian representatives in two of Algeria’s largest cities. The presentations all grapple with the objects and subjects of fraud found in archival texts, attending to the different sources that illustrate the social history of colonial North Africa and offering an alternative reading of imperial history.