In the British colony of Natal, laws governing sex for settlers were concerned with reproduction and sexual respectability, which were the grounds for imagining difference amongst imperial populations only recently assembled under colonial jurisdiction. Age of consent laws arose out of these contingencies rather than out of any concern with a liberal politics of social reform. Consequently, colonial age of consent laws governing white settlers bore only superficial resemblance to metropolitan legislative reforms such as age of consent laws. Instead, the Natal state's practices of law-making recognized three discrete and divergent moral economies of sex in the colonial laws governing white settler citizens, Native law which governed the lives of Africans and the consolidated body of laws governing Indian immigrants. In this young colony, not only did ‘age of consent’ laws have to be newly made, but they were conceived separately and contained by ‘colonial law’, ‘Native custom’ and ‘Indian custom’. The sexuality of young white woman was coded in colonial rape laws and used to draw lines of civilizational difference between settler citizens and their Others. For these others, relating sex to exceptional marriage customs excluded from legal codes of civilized common practice was how the state worked to assert difference.
Type Forum: Regulating Age of Consent in the British Empire Information Law and History Review , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 201 - 218 Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2020Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)
She is grateful for the spontaneous and generous childcare labours of Shireen Hassim and Clare Loveday one beautiful day in the Cape; for the support of the brilliant women of the Women's Writing Group; for Stephen Sparks' daily reproductive toil; and for Keith Breckenridge's encouragement of the ferocity of this woman's scholarly purpose. All of them feminist solidarities and friendships without which this paper would not have seen the light of day.
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