ABSTRACT
Of the many ways in which Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans interacted in the Atlantic World, perhaps none was more consequential for the formation of colonial societies than interracial sexual relations. Investigating interracial marriage and sexuality enables the historian to see the human relationships that shaped the Atlantic World at their most intimate level. The Atlantic World offers an interesting theater for studying the historical construction of gender because it brought together peoples with vastly different notions of how the two sexes ought to interact. The chapter provides differing perspectives on interracial sexuality and colonial gender roles from the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. In the New World, the offspring of sexual unions between Iberian men and Native American or African women violated Iberian notions of “purity of blood,” or the absence of non-Christian ancestry necessary for social and legal legitimacy.
