As French overseas departments and European ‘outermost regions’, the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Reunion are fully integrated into the EU common market. In these territories, the sugarcane industry still stands as a cornerstone of agriculture and is regarded as a structural production activity within heavily subsidized service economies. Deeply linked to their history as colonial ‘sugar islands’, the regulation of this agro-industry sheds light on the French state governance of both agrarian capitalism and industrial relations in postcolonial peripheries, and to these islands’ difficulty of fitting into the EU and global political economy. It thus constitutes an object of interest for debates in political economy regarding the role of the State in the regulation of capitalism and global markets (Schmidt, 2009; Lavenex, 2021), the integration of insular territories in the world economy (Baldacchino and Bertram, 2010), and the effects of EU development and trade policies (Bishop, 2011). In this paper, sociological approaches to political economy (Bartley, 2019) will be applied to further contribute to these debates.The subject matter of “connectedness” is all the more relevant when it comes to these insular economies that have to fit with geographically distant markets and polities. In the case of their sugarcane industry, two forms of “fractious connections” reveal the crucial role of the State in governing these political economies: - At the level of each island, the conflicts arising from capital-labor disagreements constitute a case of state mediation through the signing of tripartite contracts (farmers-producers-State), in order to establish the terms and conditions of sugarcane pricing (Beckert, 2011);- At the European and international levels, striving to fit with the globalized economy necessitates multiplayer and multilevel political work (Jullien and Smith, 2014) to rein in the EU’s liberal trade policy (Heron and Siles-Brügge, 2012), especially regarding what is often deemed as “unfair competition” caused by the EU’s economic partnerships with ACP countries (Heron, 2011).Our core argument is thus to argue that these two forms of fractious connections shed light upon the omnipresence and omnipotence of the State within the regulation of this agro-industry and the agrarian capitalism it relies on. On the one hand, sociological and historical continuities in the conflictual capital-labor relations continue to give the French State a role of economic coordination and political pacification. On the other hand, the difficulty of articulating sugar production with the world economy generates a form of "farmers-producers activism" and lobbying in order to both influence domestic agricultural policy and activate the French diplomatic apparatus to impact upon EU policies.Empirically, this paper is based on a doctoral research project which features sixty semi-structured interviews with various stakeholders at different governance levels, and extensive archival data, analyzed using qualitative methods.Based on a political and economic sociology that zooms in on multiplayer and multilevel games and the political processes that they generate, this paper shows how meso-political economy at the level of an agro-industry can inform not only the governance of capitalism, but also the sociohistorical development of peripheral political economies.< Réduire