Marrying into a Colony: The Economies of French-Native Intermarriage

Since the foundational work of scholars like Ann Laura Stoler and Ann McClintock, historians have understood gender and sexuality to have been key tools in European colonization. Historians of early America have pointed to French colonization in particular to demonstrate how intermarriage and sexual relations, especially in the fur trade, furthered French colonial goals. However, there has been little analysis on the ways that cross-cultural relationships made French colonies economically viable outside of the fur trade and worked to create French colonies out of Indian land. Moreover, the unintended effect of emphasizing French colonization through consensual sexual relationships paints French colonization as less violent than that of other European powers. My work corrects this imbalance by using seventeenth- and eighteenth-century census, parish, and colonial documents from colonial Illinois to show how French colonists created property through marriage contracts and consolidated it through patterns of inter- and remarriage. In a paper that draws on this social history I have compiled, I argue that in marrying Native women, French colonists created capital out of Illinois land, goods, and Native slaves in the first generation of colonization in Illinois country. However, in the following years, the French empire changed the laws that applied to their colonies so that Native wives would not be able to inherit or pass on property. This paper illustrates the tangible ways that French colonists used marriage in early America to gain access to land, goods, slaves, and a stable colony, thus demonstrating how French colonization via gender and sexuality could be devastatingly imperial.