This book brings an innovative study of marriage migration in Australia, offering new insights into issues of intimacy and authenticity online. In doing so, it delivers on five main objectives: exploring emotional attachment and personal life in global spaces; interrogating stereotypes and their pervasive influence on personal relations; analysing attitudes and social practice within the institution of marriage; investigating immigration policy, marriage, and citizens’ rights; theorizing gender and class relations in the current global order. The analysis moves between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ social relations and processes, with comparative data enabling a critical framing of the data on marriage relationships developed online.

This important contribution places contemporary forms of transcultural marriage and marriage brokering in a historical context of ‘marriage’ in the ‘Anglosphere’ tradition, and in particular historical forms of marriage migration in settler colonial and now multicultural Australia—including histories of colonial era ‘bride ships’ and post WW2 ‘proxy brides’ from southern Europe.