Concubinage
Concubinage is a sexual or domestic relationship in which a person, usually a woman, is attached to a household without the full legal status of marriage. Across different societies it has ranged from recognized secondary partnership to coerced sexual servitude. For histories of slavery, the key distinction is whether the concubine had a meaningful right to refuse, leave, control her children, and avoid sale, punishment, or inherited status.
Concubinage should not be treated as identical in every legal tradition. In some systems a concubine was not the same category as a field laborer or market slave; in others, enslaved women were held for sexual, reproductive, domestic, or status purposes inside households. This makes concubinage important to comparative slavery history because household language could hide coercion that was less visible than plantation or public-market slavery.
Abolition histories show why the category matters. In Zanzibar, anti-slavery law moved in stages: Sultan Barghash prohibited slave transport by sea in 1873, Ali bin Said issued the Slave Trade Prohibition Decree of 1890, and Hamoud bin Mohammed issued the Abolition Decree of 1897.[1] A British parliamentary debate in 1898 described the 1897 measure as abolishing the legal status of slavery rather than instantly freeing every enslaved person, and it also recorded official reluctance to interfere with concubinage as part of household or family arrangements.[2] Later scholarship notes that concubines were not strictly allowed to be emancipated until 1909, showing that abolition could stop at the household door before reaching sexual-domestic slavery.
Concubinage therefore belongs near slavery, marriage, domestic servitude, and forced marriage rather than inside only one category. A neutral account has to ask what legal status existed, whether the person could exit, whether children inherited the condition, and whether state or household authority enforced the relationship.