Illicit Love

“Read this book to explore both the direct and the twisted paths linking marriage and sovereignty, in richly detailed case studies spanning two disparate continents on both of which racial hierarchy characterized settler colonialism.”—Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University

“Superbly researched and imaginatively presented, McGrath’s reconstruction of stories of marriages and sexual intimacies across the lines of race and domination between settler-colonial and indigenous peoples in the U.S. and Australia, is a remarkable instance of interleaving of the two ‘national’ histories. . . . This doubly trans-national history has an unmistakable element of freshness about it that readers will no doubt welcome.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the author of The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth

“Ann McGrath’s brilliant history of intermarriage in the new nations of America and Australia reads like a novel. She uncovers hidden stories of forbidden love between settlers and Indigenous men and women that both shaped and confounded the colonial project. Writing in a style as tender as the very intimacies she describes, McGrath has created a model of how to wed private with political histories.”—Margaret Jacobs, author of White Mother to a Dark Race and A Generation Removed

“Ann McGrath reminds us that ‘weddings’ have long mixed politics and intimate passions in the interests of family, tribe, and nation. Heart-wrenching stories and subtle distinctions are laid bare in fine prose, and we find the kinship between Australia and the United States even closer than we might have thought.”—James F. Brooks, author of Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
“This is a convincing and lively analysis of how marriage helped create the modern nation. Using case studies from the Cherokee Nation and northern Australia, McGrath deftly makes the case for the key role played by marriage in settler colony histories. McGrath’s moving account is transnational history at its best.”—Philippa Levine, author of The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset and Gender and Empire

“Investigating marriages between the colonized and their colonizers, Illicit Love is an astonishing transnational history of transgression, revealing intertwined lives and irreconcilable ideas, courage and conflict, denial and defiance, secrets and surveillance, love and violence. . . . McGrath asks novel questions, tells untold stories, and writes a new history of empire. This innovative and inventive work will itself open up new worlds for its readers.”—Martha Hodes, author of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South

“Illicit Love is a stunning piece of comparative history. With the storytelling abilities of a novelist, and the detective skills of the accomplished historian that she is, Ann McGrath reveals how interracial relationships stirred a myriad of emotions among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans and Australians, and raised what became enduring questions about the meaning of Cherokee and Aboriginal identities.”—Gregory Smithers, author of Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780s–1890s

“This is a beautiful book, a tale of family, racial mixture, and identity in two settler colonial societies. . . . McGrath’s stories of love and marriage across the color line, told in luminous prose, will delight. . . . Illicit Love ought to be a prizewinner.”—Paul Spickard, author of Race in Mind