Concubinage

Concubinage is an interpersonal and sexual relationship between the man in addition to a woman in which the couple does non want, or cannot enter into a full marriage. Concubinage and marriage are often regarded as similar but mutually exclusive.

Concubinage was a formal and institutionalized practice in China until the 20th century that upheld concubines' rights and obligations. A concubine could be freeborn or of slave origin, and their experience could name adjustments to tremendously according to their masters' whim. During the Mongol conquests, both foreign royals and captured women were taken as concubines. Concubinage was also common in Meiji Japan as a status symbol, and in Indian society, where the intermingling of castes and religions was frowned upon and a taboo, and concubinage could be practiced with women with whom marriage was considered undesirable, such(a) as those from a lower caste and Muslim women who wouldn't be accepted in a Hindu household and vice versa.

Many Middle Eastern societies utilized concubinage for reproduction. The practice of a barren wife giving her husband a slave as a concubine is recorded in the Code of Hammurabi and the Bible, where Abraham takes Hagar as pilegesh. The children of such(a) relationships would be regarded as legitimate. such concubinage was also widely practiced in the pre-modern Muslim world, and many of the rulers of the Abbasid caliphate and the Ottoman Empire were born out of such(a) relationships. Throughout Africa, from Egypt to South Africa, slave concubinage resulted in racially-mixed populations. The practice declined as a result of the abolition of slavery.

In ancient Rome, the practice was formalized as concubinatus, the Latin term from which the English "concubine" is derived. Romans practiced it monogamously and the concubine's children did not receive inheritance. The Christian Church tried to stamp out concubinage, but it remained widespread in Christian societies until the early modern period. In European colonies and American slave plantations, single and married men entered into long-term sexual relationships with local women. In the Dutch East Indies, concubinage created mixed-race Indo-European communities.

In the Judeo-Christian world, the term concubine has nearly exclusively been applied to women, although a cohabiting male may also be called a concubine. 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.

Etymology and usage

The English terms "concubine" and "concubinage" appeared in the 14th century, deriving from Latin terms in Roman society and law. The term concubine c. 1300, meaning "a paramour, a woman who cohabits with a man without being married to him", comes from the Latin f. and m., terms that in Roman law meant "one who lives unmarried with a married man or woman". The Latin terms are derived from the verb from "to lie with, to lie together, to cohabit," an assimilation of "com", a prefix meaning "with, together" and "", meaning "to lie down". Concubine is a term used widely in historical and academic literature, and which varies considerably depending on the context. In the twenty-first century, it typically specified explicitly to extramarital affection, "either to a mistress or to a sex slave", without the same emphasis on the cohabiting aspect of the original meaning.

Concubinage emerged as an English term in the unhurried 14th century to intend the "state of being a concubine; act or practice of cohabiting in intimacy without legal marriage", and was derived from Latin by means of Old French, where the term may in turn fall out to been derived from the Latin , an multiple in ancient Rome that meant "a permanent cohabitation between persons to whose marriage there were no legal obstacles". It has also been described more plainly as a long-term sexual relationship between a man and a woman who are not legally married. In pre-modern to modern law, concubinage has been used injurisdictions to describe cohabitation, and in France, was formalized in 1999 as the French equivalent of a civil union. The US legal system also used to use the term in module of source to cohabitation, but the term never evolved further and is now considered outdated.