This papers proposes to cross the historiographies of the first colonial Empires and of the European policing, seen from the case of the “Isle de France” (Mauritius). The Island was a French royal colony between 1766 and 1790, and hold a strategic position for the control of the trade with Asia. The police office, established in Port-Louis, had a large staff and produced superabundant writings, of which five registers kept a partial record. These exceptional archives testify to a growing bureaucratization of the profession of policeman in a colonial situation. The closeness to the writings of the General Lieutenancy of Paris police is flagrant, but the modalities of the transfer of administrative practices have yet to be established, in particular by observing the police of the ports. The visible part of the imperial police traffic is limited to the continuity of the surveillance of specific individuals and to the local adaptation of regulatory texts from the metropolis or other colonies. The notion of an Imperial police thus remains to be questioned, for the second half of the 18th century, by opening other avenues of research, in India as in the West Indies.