Mélanie Lamotte
Assistant Professor of History at Duke University and author of By Flesh and Toil, an interdisciplinary historian specializing in the early French empire, race, sex, and labor.
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Feb 18, 2026 • 27min
Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)
Mélanie Lamotte, Assistant Professor of History at Duke University who studies French colonialism and the Black diaspora. She traces how interracial sex, sexual violence, and labor shaped the early French Empire. She maps transoceanic connections across Atlantic and Indian Ocean colonies. She explains intermarriage, bans, and how people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent shaped imperial law and society.
