In North Africa, historians long assumed that the colonization of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia was a financial boon for France and indeed could be explained through material interests (often known as the "colonial pact"). Yet more recently, scholars have highlighted that colonization ceased to be profitable for the metropole after 1930, even if important capitalist interests continued to benefit from state monopolies. This paper explores this tension and argues that economic calculations had long been viewed as a way of creating la plus grande France rather than maximizing profits for the capitalist system. Moreover, it asks a question: what can the concept of racial capitalism tell us about the intersection of economic and racial domination in the region? Starting with an overview of the different economic ties that bound France to these three territories, the paper focuses on the extension of the wine industry, which drew the early ire of metropolitan wine-growers. This was an early harbinger of the economic, political, and social tensions that would mark decolonization. The production of wine was indelibly linked to the creation of a settler identity, a clear example of how the importance of economic interests went deeper than the mere production and redistribution of material wealth. The second part of the paper looks at the postwar period and charts the transformation of the political economy in the last years of French empire. It highlights how economic theories such as "Cartierism," which claimed that France's colonization of the Maghreb was actually an obstacle to the country's postwar recovery, couched moral and racial arguments in economic terms. Indeed, contemporary debates on colonial development by French historians expose the ways in which the discussion of the "merits of empire" have used the economy as a site for defending a racial conception of French nationalism.