Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Power and Global Encounters - Timothy Nicholson

With a chronology that spans from 1500 to the present day, Interracial Intimacies centers relationships as a historical force in the making of the modern world, rethinking world history from the ground up, and illuminating how everyday relationships helped produce global hierarchies and how people shaped their own lives within them.

The book moves from slave ships and battlefields to migrant neighbourhoods and courtrooms to show how relationships across racial, cultural, and imperial boundaries shaped systems of power, identity, and belonging. It highlights the intersection of social, political and cultural factors that worked to segregate people based on race and how the development of interracial sexual relationships worked to threaten this division. Through personal vignettes and vivid global case studies, the book shows that interracial relationships were never merely private affairs. They were sites where race, gender, sexuality, and empire were negotiated, enforced, and sometimes resisted, especially by women and marginalized peoples navigating deeply unequal worlds. The book argues that racial boundaries hardened alongside the rise of modern states, capitalism, and scientific racism in a global setting; as governments used marriage laws, segregation, and moral policing to regulate intimacy, interracial relationships became flashpoints for anxieties about national belonging.

Written for advanced undergraduate students, Interracial Intimacies will be of interest to students of World History, Gender Studies, Race Studies, and Cultural Studies.