Interracial Sex and the Making of Empire

Abstract

This chapter brings together examples from the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia in order to assess the multiple modalities of interracial sexual relationships as they unfolded over the longue durée of Europe's imperial expansion, from the late fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In tracing the common threads and divergent patterns that are discernable in the global history of interracial sex and the making of empire, the chapter argues that a singular focus on temporality, geography, or even colonizing power does little in the way of explaining these commonalities and variations. Rather, the life histories of individual colonial projects, situated within the wider context of empire, provide the necessary context for understanding the different forms taken by interracial sexual relationships (marriage, concubinage, prostitution, rape) at particular historical moments and in particular locales and how this changed over time; the ideologies and anxieties that shaped their existence; the diverse systems of regulation devised to encourage, manage, control, penalize, criminalize, or prohibit interracial sex; and the kinds of relationships and categories of people that were marked out for different forms of regulation.

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