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This study is centrally concerned with examining the historical construction of difference through the contestations surrounding the state regulation of marriage custom in colonial Natal. It attends to the historical making of gender ideology and practice, in particular how the legal machinations of colonial state-making in 19th and early 20th century Natal relate to the imagining of a colonial order differentiated by race and gender. As an account of the role of multiple, different and changing forms of patriarchal state-making, espoused in the actions of various prominent officials and legislative bodies tasked with governing colonial subjects in this region, this work seeks to demonstrate the possibilities offered by gendered histories of law and ‘the state’, in all of its contestation and complexity, to address the racialized compartmentalization which characterizes the historiography of colonial Natal. The relations among colonial officials inside of the colonial state bureaucracy, employers of labor, white settlers and Indian and African subjects in this period implied particular forms of gendered negotiation and contestation which worked to shape social hierarchies at contingent moments of colonial rule. Women were both discursively and materially drawn into these struggles over the relative masculinity and femininity of colonialism’s citizens and its subjects. Thus, both women and men who were the citizens and subjects of British colonialism might be viewed as actors in a wide field of gendered contestation. In the context of the colonial history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Natal, such a gendered analysis of the relations of colonial rule has further implications: it permits viewing ‘African’, ‘Indian’ and ‘White’ subjects within the same analytical frame, by considering colonial processes of regulation which were common to all of these legally-identified groups. The intentions of a gendered analysis are twofold: by placing gender at the center of this account I illuminate the gendered constructions and effects of colonial rule, as well as drawing out the similarities, complexities and contingencies of ostensibly ‘separate’ policies for supposedly distinct racial groups in the same colonial space.