Wider Horizons and Modern Desire: The Contradictions of America and Racial Difference in London 1935-45

The sexual and romantic encounters between white British women and black servicemen from the United States which took place between 1942-1945 can be traced back to the commercial and entertainment cultures of the inter-war period, and to the idea of America and the modern in the English popular imagination. These developments
in turn laid the groundwork for the distinctive formation of British post-colonial domestic race relations in the second half of the twentieth century – and in particular,
the gradual, albeit very uneven, normalisation of relationships between men of Afro-Caribbean descent and white English women.