Making Love, Making Empire: Family, Colonial Racism, and Border Controls

This chapter explores how ideals of ‘family’ are central to how racialization is structured in post- colonial states like Britain. It examines how dominant concepts of heteronormative ‘family life’ are used in the organization of immigration and border regimes in contemporary Britain. It demonstrates how contemporary ideals of ‘family’ (domesticity and socio-sexual intimacy) are born out of the history of colonial control and dispossession under formal empire. It shows how racialized appeals to ‘family’ were central to early 20th-century border controls and continue to justify restrictive immigration regimes today. The chapter is organized in three parts: first, it explores the role of family and intimacy in European empires, and how certain forms of family became encoded as civilized or backwards; second, it explores the relationship between family and the control of mobility under the British Empire; and, third, it brings the discussion back to present-day immigration regimes.