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. During the early stages of European colonialism, administrators often encouraged European men to practice concubinage to discourage them from paying prostitutes for sex which could spread venereal disease and from homosexuality.
Colonial administrators also believed that having an intimate relationship with a native woman would enhance white men's understanding of native culture and would provide them with essential domestic labor. The latter was critical to the colonial project, as it meant white men did not require wives from the metropole, hence did not require a family wage.
Colonial administrators eventually discouraged the practice when these liaisions resulted in offspring who threatened colonial rule by producing a mixed race class that might contest white hegemony. This political threat eventually prompted colonial administrators to encourage white women to travel to the colonies, where they contributed to the colonial project, benefitting from their racial privilege, while at the same time contributing to the cult of domesticity, the illusion of separate public and private spheres, and their own oppression via white men.
In China , until the 20th century, concubinage was a formal and institutionalized practice that upheld concubines' rights and obligations. Many Middle Eastern societies used concubinage for reproduction. In ancient Rome , the practice of concubinatus was a monogamous relationship that was an alternative to marriage, usually because of the woman's lesser social status.
Widowed or divorced men often took a concubina , the Latin term from which the English "concubine" is derived, rather than remarrying, so as to avoid complications of inheritance. 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.
