Debates around citizenship are structured around a perverse depersonalization and a history of racialized segregation for South Asians in the aftermath of colonialism. Legal regimes are structured around preserving power for the white male subject.

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.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.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.