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Concubinage is an interpersonal and sexual relationship between two people in which the couple does not want to, or cannot, enter into a full marriage.[1] Concubinage and marriage are often regarded as similar, but mutually exclusive.[2]
In China, until the 20th century, concubinage was a formal and institutionalized practice that upheld concubines' rights and obligations.[3] A concubine could be freeborn or of slave origin, and her experience could vary tremendously according to her master's whim.[3] During the Mongol conquests, both foreign royals[4] and captured women were taken as concubines.[5] Concubinage was also common in Meiji Japan as a status symbol.[6]
Many Middle Eastern societies used concubinage for reproduction.[7] The practice of a barren wife giving her husband a slave as a concubine is recorded in the Code of Hammurabi.[7] The children of such relationships would be regarded as legitimate.[7] Such concubinage was also widely practiced in the premodern Muslim world, and many of the rulers of the Abbasid caliphate and the Ottoman Empire were born out of such relationships.[8] Throughout Africa, from Egypt to South Africa, slave concubinage resulted in racially mixed populations.[9] The practice declined as a result of the abolition of slavery.[8]
In ancient Rome, the practice was formalized as concubinatus, the Latin term from which the English "concubine" is derived. It referred to any extramarital sexual relationship, most often that between a wealthy or politically powerful man and a woman of low social origins kept for sexual service. The marital status of the man was irrelevant and the concubine's children did not receive an inheritance.[10][11] After the Christianization of the Roman Empire, Christian emperors improved the status of the concubine by granting concubines and their children the sorts of property and inheritance rights usually reserved for wives.[11] In European colonies and American slave plantations, single and married men entered into long-term sexual relationships with local women.[12] In the Dutch East Indies, concubinage created mixed-race Indo-European communities.[13]
In the Judeo-Christian world, the term concubine has almost exclusively been applied to women, although a cohabiting male may also be called a concubine.[14] In the 21st century, concubinage is used in some Western countries as a gender-neutral legal term to refer to cohabitation (including cohabitation between same-sex partners).[15][16][17]
- ^ The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History 2008.
- ^ The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History 2008, p. 467.
- ^ a b Rodriguez 2011, p. 203.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
:02was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Peter Jackson (May 2014). The Mongols and the West 1221-1410. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781317878988.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
a05was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ a b c The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History 2008, p. 469.
- ^ a b Cortese 2013.
- ^ "slave labor/slavery". The Greenwood Encyclopedia of International Relations: S-Z. p. 1530.
- ^ Historical Dictionary of Slavery and Abolition 2014, p. 122.
- ^ a b The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History 2008, p. 471.
- ^ Historical Dictionary of Slavery and Abolition 2014, p. 122-123.
- ^ Hagemann, Rose & Dudink 2020, p. 320.
- ^ "Concubinage". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 25 October 2021.
- ^ Long, Scott (2006). Family, unvalued : discrimination, denial, and the fate of binational same-sex couples under U.S. law. New York: Human Rights Watch. ISBN 9781564323361. Retrieved 29 November 2021.
- ^ Halho, H.R. (1972). "The Law of Concubinage". South African Law Journal. 89: 321–332.
- ^ Soles III, Donald E. (2016). "Truisms & Tautologies: Ambivalent Conclusions regarding Same-Sex Marriage in Chapin v. France". Global Justice & Public Policy. 3: 149.