As a feminist scholar of the British Empire who grew up intellectually in the 1980s, I am grateful for the ways that these articles allow us to revisit some of the keywords and critical concepts that animated histories of race, gender, conjugality, and un/lawful sex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in both metropole and colony. Work by Deborah Gorham, Judith Walkowitz, Tanika Sarkar, Mrinalini Sinha, Philippa Levine, and others illustrate how and why legislative projects such as the original Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), the Age of Consent Bill (1890), the Ilbert Bill (1891), and the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts (1864 at home; 1886 and following in the empire) were not simply acts of disciplining and punishment but also enculturation devices aimed at managing the global project of racial respectability and its governors, whether white, brown, or black.Footnote ¹ Lest we take it for granted, that work opened up heretofore frankly unimaginable spaces, historiographically speaking, of politics and culture shaped by legal strategies designed at once to call out and restrain the sexual energies that were seen to threaten a civilized and civilizing anglophone order. What Ann Stoler identified as the links between “carnal knowledge and imperial power” were legible thanks in part to these feminist cultural historians, who took sex seriously even as they refused the narratives that polite society told itself about why the sexual desire of some men required the “protection” and constraint of some girls and women.Footnote ² The articles collected here build on these earlier studies but bring new lenses, specifically a focus on the operation of legal regimes of consent as they were produced through struggles about, over, and for the adolescent girl's body. Although each author deals with specific cases in particular local, regional, national. and imperial contexts, there are a number of patterns that are striking.

The first is a process of depersonalization, in which the specificities of the victim's or victims' circumstances and identities drop out in favor of a more abstract concept of legal personhood. This is, of course, a common procedural effect of the law itself, which is grounded in a case or cases and moves to broader principles that can be appropriated as precedent or as universal principle. Even so, the trials here reveal historical processes that tend toward discourses of abstraction that are notable. Rukhmabai, whose celebrated case came before multiple judges and turned on the question of conjugal rights and their restitution, was sensationalized to such a degree that in certain metropolitan and colonial circles her name stood in for the scandal of reform. Her legal trials, although immersed in these questions, narrowed the focus to the legitimacy of restitution and “intelligent” consent. The details of Rukhmabai's story were never far from the surface; but even when the court engaged them, it was always in the service of producing a legal account that rose above the facts of her case. Given the perceived dangers of respectable women appearing in public at all, let alone a woman appearing in public whose conjugal life was on trial, it is hardly surprising that Rukhmabai herself participated in this process of abstraction. As Kanika Sharma shows, her public plea—which drew as much on the Shastras as on contemporary notions of women's education—effectively made a case for the girl/woman as a Hindu person capable of informed consent through knowledge.

If the emergence of legal personhood stripped of dangerous particulars about debates on girls’ sexuality and capacity for consent is easiest to glean from Rukhmabai's case, there are traces of it in the others as well. Rather than seeing the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act as “progress” over the earlier Offences Against the Person Act, we come to appreciate through Laura Lammasniemi's research that shifting narratives of childhood left class-based prejudices in place, leaving the working-class girl “person” very little room for maneuver where consent was concerned. In this sense, narratives of sexual danger, although clearly sensational, are a distraction from the distinctions that legal personhood shored up; here, by reasserting womanhood, consent, and marriage in ways that perpetually disadvantaged the working-class child. Personhood was arguably conferred on women at the expense of girls. If abstraction is a form of violence, the 1889 case of Phulmonee Dasi is an excruciating case in point. Her body were so bloodied that she could not even speak; her wounds are what “spoke eloquently,” erasing her embodied person on the way to accounting for her claims to personhood before the law. Sarkar brilliantly shows how the convergence of social reform and political nationalism required Phulmonee, in the end, to be a “culture-bearing person:” abstracted of biography and assimilated to legal precedent and “scrubbed” of particularity, let alone of will or desire. Whereas earlier generations of historians foregrounded the court of public opinion as part of their attempts to write social and cultural histories of sexual danger, here we see how intentionally the legal system worked to strip out those variables and with them the contexts that made the plaintiffs embodied subjects rather than legal persons per se.

Unsurprisingly, these debates participated in the consolidation of the consenting legal person as white. That is to say that, as Elizabeth Thornberry notes, childhood was a metaphor for racial inferiority and so much more. Although this was clearly the case in debates about conjugality in India, race was not a dominant feature of that discourse. Or, it was the particular valences of blackness in the Southern African context that meant that consent debates had an undeniably whitening effect in discourse and in law. In the Cape of Good Hope, for example, the 1893 Criminal Law Amendment Act (CLAA) mapped these racial boundaries; the Destitute Children's Relief Act with which it was twinned clarified the class parameters of whiteness by distinguishing poor whites not simply from blacks but from middle-class whites as well. Depersonalization was part and parcel of this process: the CLAA set up a “universal category of innocent girlhood” that was presumptively white and middle class. What is interesting in this context is the way that local people and practices actively challenged these presumptions as they happened, as the challenges to white protectionism mounted by Deena Rubusana and black public opinion effectively demonstrate. In Natal, where the protection of white men was also ascendant, the racial landscape of black–white was complicated by Indian indentured labor and migration, which positioned women of African descent and women of South Asian descent in the same structural position, but produced legislation particular to “natives” and “coolies.” Here perhaps, the logic of abstraction is perhaps most perverse. Whereas finer-grained ethnic and racial distinctions are calcified through segregation law, the social and cultural contexts of customary practice are deemed at once pathological and irrelevant when it comes to imperial criminality, which privileges the normative white male subject—that abstract, hegemonic legal person—and his desires.

At the root of the consolidation of the abstract legal person are, ultimately, the interests of patriarchy as a social, cultural, and political formation. This is especially true in an imperial context in which sexuality and reproduction are at stake. As Lata Mani demonstrated more than 20 years ago in her discussion of the resurgence of sati as a practice in the first two decades of the nineteenth century Raj, Hindu pundits and British imperial officials actively collaborated because they each saw the body of the Hindu widow as ground zero for the normative social-sexual order. Deniz Kandiyoti called this the “patriarchal bargain,” and we see it at work in both the Indian and the South African cases.Footnote ³ Tanika Sarkar's sharp interpretive take leaves no doubt: “the court briefly interrogated the culture of Hindu marriage; only to give it an honorable discharge.” She goes one step further, showing how little distance there was between Hindu opinion, on the one hand, and Indian nationalism, on the other (“cultural nationalism imparted most compelling words to traditional orthodoxy”). And lest there be any doubt about the liberal or “progressive” character of Raj practices, she concludes: “Far from colonizing Indian cultural pasts, colonial state conservatism had tried to meet Hindu conservatism on equal terms.” Allowing for the specificities of tribal custom, the same collaborative patriarchal interests may be said to have operated in Natal. Sheik notes that the Native Marriage Act of 1869 gave fathers and husbands greater control over women than did customary law. The same was true in the Cape, where, Thornberry observes, the Xhosa practice of ukumetsha was not considered a crime under the CLAA. Despite the fact that debates about the CLAA there were marked by rhetoric about native men's promiscuity, when the law was extended to the Native Territories in 1905 it was done at the behest of chiefs seeking to bolster African patriarchal norms. Even John Tengo Jabavu, known for his support for racial equality and women's rights, supported age of consent standards. As in the metropole, social purity and patriarchal norms were most often entangled.

The legislative chamber and the formal court room were the official sites for the consolidation of age of consent as a sign of white male and middle-class respectability at both the individual and the “civilizational” level. The court of public opinion was and is absolutely critical not just for apprehending the historical meanings and significance of legal personhood in its fin-de-siècle forms, but also for the imperial/global framework in which those concepts circulated. The articles here reconfirm and add new layers to earlier work on legislative reform instruments such as the CLAA and the CD Acts, in part because they draw on print culture and other forms of public media discourse to show what a dense transfer point the press was, and how intentionally it was mobilized by advocates and critics of consent. This is significant for several reasons. First, the 1880s was a kind of take-off point for Victorian print culture organs, both in the metropole and in the empire, to such a degree that we can think of the late nineteenth century as a catalytic moment in the history of Britain's paper empire. As Isabel Hofmeyr has shown in the case of Gandhi's printing press, print culture was a major political and cultural force, bringing geographically dispersed readers into contact with both contemporary debates and each other, and generating the possibility of embracing “new kinds of ethical selves” in the process.Footnote ⁴ Factual knowledge of the law and opinions about agent of consent reform efforts circulated across the empire, which in turn allowed for an emerging space where conjugality, male desire, women's bodies, and the disciplining aspirations of various patriarchal formations came spectacularly into view. Work on the CD Acts and their global imperial impact has been at the forefront of our understanding of how sexual practices of colonizers and colonized helped to constitute British imperial policy, as well as colonial ideas about and regimes of social order and good governance. Taken together, these araticles underscore how critical age of consent debates were to the emergence of Britain's reputation as hegemonic—that is to say, dominant by consent—at the site of sexuality.

Having this panoramic view is surely unique in the history of age of consent scholarship itself as well. Links between metropole and colony in the context of the Raj have suffused historiography since the 1990s, when postcolonial politics and priorities shaped how students of gender and sexuality in colonial India approached the very concept of childhood. But we have not had such an in-depth sense of the Southern African story or of the way that consent debates spoke to both broader imperial trends and local political formations. Sarkar's claim that the Phulmonee case occasioned unprecedented forms of public nationalist protests is powerful testimony to the complex contributions of age of consent debates to anticolonial history. Thornberry shows how caught up the CLAA struggle was in Cape liberalism and women's suffrage debates, whereas Nafisa Essop Sheik points to the practical simultaneity of the Coolie Consolidation Laws with the Ilbert Bill and age of consent legislation in India (1890–91). There may be scope for even more research on how reform in one colonial context shaped the contours of debate and change in another. It will be interesting, in other words, to see if future work can match this transnational view with an intracolonial one, tracking the ways that reformers and their antagonists cited each other between the spaces of empire, and how or whether the metropole and its precedents remained central to those discursive networks, and for how long. Here too the connections—and disconnections—between class and caste are salient, if not self-evidently portable or translatable across colonial legal spaces, whether across imperial territories or internal to regional ones. Rukhmabai's trial is a Raj story but it is also very much a western Indian story. What Shefali Chandra has called “languages of caste and desire,” and their capacity to mobilize and of course to thwart social mobility, are deeply vernacular, even as they are entangled with colonial and global registers. The challenge of this kind of comparative work is always to see both general patterns and the particularities that shape, in this case, the political culture of conjugality and reproductive norms. Meanwhile, it is possible to say about empire what Chandra has said about the English language: that, “its ability to stake differences between social groups and to produce the consenting …. subject, was generated by discourses of sex and gender.”Footnote ⁵

Having acknowledged how these articles reorient earlier histories and add important material weight to the scholarship on sexuality and empire, I want to try to place them briefly in conversation with very recent work on law and empire that positions British imperial visions alongside competing forms of sovereignty, whether diasporic or anticolonial. Renisa Mawani's Across Oceans of Law uses the case of the Komagata Maru incident to think through law as a networked, mobile phenomenon: a matrix of signs and procedures in which the priority of the prior is constantly in peril. In her narratives, the capacity of British imperial law to read, let alone manage, local conditions is routinely challenged by actors who insist on the ocean and the mobilities it sponsored as their prerogative and on law's flexibility in a transnational context: actors such as Gurdit Singh who recognize prior genealogies but seize on them as instruments of their own agendas. It is precisely this tension zone, between transnational possibility and imperial realpolitik, that gives Mawani's work its theoretical energy. She is also interested in “how conceptions of legality and sovereignty move through symbolic circuits that crisscross imperial jurisdictions.” She takes a decidedly anti-identitarian approach, exploring “how competing significations of indigeneity were mobilized rhetorically and symbolically by British Indian subjects and by colonial authorities alike, each aspiring to assert their claims to imperial sovereignty” and, in a frankly brilliant reading of the Komagata Maru's circulation, she determines how and why nativeness becomes the sign as well as “the arbiter of Canada's restrictive immigration policy.”Footnote ⁶

How might we think about what we know about age of consent debates in conversation with this kind of work? Certainly, the CLAA exhibits concerns about sovereignty rooted expressly in notions of bodily integrity and violability that operate in the service of shoring up the social, sexual, and imperial political order. As I have suggested, and as the articles clearly show, what Thornberry might call social knowledge about legal regimes of consent traveled both from metropole and colony and between colonial spaces. Because this is not the subject of their work, we have only glimpses of the networks that carried this knowledge, but reform organizations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union are surely important nodes. Also, we see colonial subjects—such as Phulmonee's female relatives and Deena Rubusana—using the official courts and the court of public opinion to stake their claims both to legal representation and, in the context of Indian nationalism and Cape liberalism, to imperial politics.

An equally generative model is Brenna Bhandar's Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Legal Regimes of Ownership. Bhandar's emphasis is on racial regimes of ownership and more specifically, on the violence of abstraction that turns property into a commodity; a process, she argues, that “has a counterpart in racial thinking that figured entire populations in a hierarchy of value with whiteness at its apex.”Footnote ⁷ She draws on three theorists whose work might be useful for thinking about how to frame age of consent laws in a transnational imperial frame: Stuart Hall, with his insistence on the contingency and unevenness of racial practices; Patrick Wolfe, whose claim that race is the modality through which colonialism takes place on a global scale; and Jodi Byrd, whose counterclaim is that the conflation of race and colonialism not only erases indigeneity but makes it a space of transit, geographically and temporally, through which conquest passes and ostensibly moves beyond. Whether age of consent debates engage indigeneity per se or not, they can and should underscore the links between the legal time of childhood and the temporality of legal jurisdiction, in both metropole and colony. By fixing minority and majority in law, the national-imperial state determines both its interest and its investment in the female body: a process of abstraction that is not so far removed from property or commodification. These dimensions are implicit in the articles in the issue, but as they are read and taught in conjunction with Bhandar, those aspects may become more salient and might make way for a more materialist approach to the extended CLAA moment of the fin-de-siècle. I think too that Bhandar's methodological schema for thinking about the colonial lives of property— use, propertied abstractions, improvement, and status—is useful as a mode for conceptualizing the imperial life of age of consent debates.

Meanwhile, the rigorous and vigorous approach that these essays take to gender and its reproductive futurity remind us that for all their signification as matrices of imperial power, the bodies of women and girls—or men and boys, for that matter—are never “merely cultural.”Footnote ⁸ As partially postcolonial global forces rise up to reclaim girlhood and womanhood for new regimes of racial purity, keeping histories of the links among the conjugal body, racialized property, and state sovereignty in an imperial frame alive has never been more urgent. Indeed, in any sphere where even aspirational hegemony operates, domination is paired with and constituted through consent at multiple scales. For historians of sexuality in an imperial context and of empire as a sexualized racial regime, this is essential working knowledge that confirms, in turn, the indispensability of intersectional methodological practice.