Interracial Marriage in the Atlantic World

Abstract

The transformations wrought in the Atlantic world during the colonial era brought Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans into sustained contact in the Americas for the first time, fostering interethnic mixing, sexual violence and intimacy, and intermarriage. In a wide variety of colonial sites across the Atlantic, interracial marriages expanded kinship and trading networks, cemented military and political alliances, and facilitated the adaptation and survival of Native communities. Interracial marriages not only provided economic and social benefits to European and Euro-American explorers, traders, and settlers and the indigenous populations whom they encountered, they also served as a powerful political tool in contested borderlands far from imperial centers. In Latin America, North America, the Caribbean, and along the West African coast, European males mingled socially and sexually with women of Indian, African, and mixed heritage, though the vast majority of these interracial relationships took place outside the sanctity of marriage, and many involved some level of coercion. While historians have traditionally held that racially mixed marriages occurred with greater regularity in Spain’s New World colonies, in contrast to the French and English empires, more recent scholarship has demonstrated the ubiquity of interracial concubinage, informal marriage, and intermarriage throughout the early modern Atlantic world. Responses to the frequency and visibility of illicit interracial relations were nonetheless uneven and changed over time, as the emergence of legal, social, and cultural prohibitions against interracial marriage prevented the widespread acceptance of racially exogamous mixed unions and intermarriage. Focusing on official attitudes toward and legal restrictions on racial interaction and interracial marriage as well as everyday practices, these newer studies track the extent to which colonial policies varied in response to local conditions and broader imperial developments. Attention to intermarriage as a tool of colonization and strategy for assimilation has underscored the critical role of Native women as cultural intermediaries. Scholars argue that the toleration or ban of interracial marital unions by officials depended upon a range of interrelated factors: demographic conditions, the ancestry of the female partners (European, Indian, African, or mixed heritage), public attitudes toward interracial mixture, colonizing and trading goals, and transatlantic religious and intellectual currents. Intermarriage, and the inclusion of mixed-raced offspring in kinship networks, fundamentally transformed family structures, shaped developing notions of racial difference, and posed challenges to group cohesion and individual and national identity.