| Sumario: | This article examines discourses that developed in relation to terms such as 'concubine', 'mistress', and 'wife' in contemporary sources of the 18th and nineteenth century and in subsequent scholarship on Atlantic slavery. Over the eighteenth century, long-term sexual enslavement, a practice called 'concubinage' in a range of sources on the Anglo-Atlantic, established sexual violence as a fundamental component of the development of culture and law in British Atlantic slave societies. As debates over slavery grew, opponents and supporters of slavery appropriated terms such as 'concubine' in arguments about the (im)morality of slavery. Both the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and discourses moralizing against interracial sex comprised the system through which law and custom subjugated enslaved women. This practice's significance extends beyond discussions of the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. This essay traces this term's uses and associations in sources ranging from early colonial documents to mid-nineteenth century U.S. abolitionists' writings. Varied uses of the term 'concubine' and its disassociation from sexual exploitation, violence, and resistance/refusal reveal how, in British and U.S. slave societies, enslavers' maintenance of power often pivoted on connections among sexual violence, coercion, and conceptions of family.
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