Concubinage

Concubinage is an institutionalized, socially and often legally recognized arrangement in which a person, historically most often a man of elevated status, maintains a sexual and domestic relationship with one or more women, concubines, who hold a formally acknowledged but subordinate status distinct from that of a legal wife, typically without the full inheritance or legitimacy rights a wife's children would hold. The institution was extensively documented and regulated across many historical civilizations, including ancient China, where concubinage was formally integrated into elite and imperial household structure with clearly defined ranks distinguishing concubines from principal wives, the Ottoman Empire, where the imperial harem maintained an elaborate hierarchy of concubines including some who could rise to substantial political influence as mothers of future sultans, and ancient Rome, where concubinatus was a recognized, legally distinct cohabitation short of full marriage. Concubinage differed in status and legal consequence across these societies, but a recurring pattern across many of them allowed the offspring of a concubine some, though generally lesser, rights of inheritance or legitimacy compared with children of a principal wife, and in several historical Islamic and East Asian legal traditions a concubine's status could be elevated, including to the position of wife, under specified conditions. The institution has been progressively abolished or delegitimized across most of the world since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, driven by legal reform, the spread of monogamous marriage law, and, in China's case, formal abolition following the 1949 revolution, though informal analogues are documented in some societies into the present.