Standards of Transnational Marriages and Coloniality

The article unfolds the relation of Western standards for international marriage to coloniality. Three general moments of law-making are examined: 1) the typical duality of so-called ‘interprovincial laws’ imposed by the metropole on the colony, discriminating between family and market relations adopted by imperial powers in 18th and 19th centuries; 2) the drafting process of Hague Marriage Convention 1902 where only European powers were invited with the ambition to set a base for global standards of marriage recognition; 3) the drafting process of UN Marriage Convention (1962) which was demonstratively driven by reports of imperial stake-holders from former colonies. The article elaborates the link between marriage and economic governance in colonial relations through the process of international marriage standard-setting. The legal duality of marriage/contract relations in the colonies was a preferable choice at first, followed by the motivation to, among others, limit expenditures with unnecessary administration. The legal doctrine was attuned to this incentive and largely elaborated the concept of marriage as religion- or culture-specific. In the drafting process of the UN Marriage Convention hundred years later, gender relations in the postcolonial territories were seen as an obstacle to the economic progress of these emerging nations. The adoption of this convention then solidified the conceptualization of some aspects of (Western) marriage as human rights with claims to universal validity. The article problematizes religion-essentialist conceptualizations of diversity among marriage patterns by highlighting the links that conditions of marriage have to the projects of political economy.