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How the rhetoric of monogamy was weaponized against Indigenous and queer lives by colonial powers in the nineteenth century

While marital monogamy is often posited as inevitable and essential, it was in fact a negotiated practice inflicted onto occupied lands to enforce social control and white settler reproduction. Conjugal States makes an ambitious and far-reaching investigation of how colonizers used monogamy to symbolize modernity, weaponized against Indigenous communities in South Africa, New Zealand, and British Columbia-and how this process was complicated by the emergence of the Mormon Church.

In Conjugal States, T.J. Tallie reveals how the queer destabilizing potential of Mormon polygamy in the nineteenth century clashed with the broader aims of colonization, resulting in legal action against plural marriages and fears of Mormon "contamination" in other settler spaces. As colonial powers attempted to delineate and justify their occupation, monogamous marriage became a key method of performative civilization. By analyzing the fraught debates concerning gender, marriage, belonging, and race that arose between British settlers, Christian missionaries, South Asian migrants, and Indigenous peoples in contested territories around the world, Tallie reveals how marital practices and prohibitions shaped the contours of colonial life.

A deeply archival work, Conjugal States illuminates how both monogamous marriage and colonial power were predicated on the precarity of their own control. Tallie tells the story of the enormous repercussions of this global phenomenon, providing a history of sexuality, settler colonialism, and Indigenous peoples that charts varied forms of native resistance to settler incursions.

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