Few readers today will be surprised to learn that in the 1830s, the Reverend Alexander Simpson of the London Missionary Society in the Tahitian field sexually abused many of the girls in his care at a school for the children of missionaries. The current focus on child sexual abuse has shown that religious boarding institutions create a virtual algorithm of age, status, power, opportunity, and vulnerability, too often resulting in both abuse and the subsequent cover up.

Yet the charges were a deep shock to the London-based mission society for whom Tahiti was meant to be the jewel in the crown. Drawn to the high islands of Eastern Polynesia by the thrilling literature on the Pacific published from the Wallis and Cook expeditions, missionaries were at first dismayed by their failure to convey to Islanders how they had been moved and saved by their Book. Conversion, when it came under the Tahitian leader Pomare II, was little consolation, for the new faith was deeply entangled in Tahitian and then wider Polynesian politics. Missionary fantasies of compliant converted “natives” were quickly disabused; the daily grind of mission life wore away missionaries' faith, tested their pious expectations, and revealed their weaknesses.

By the 1840s, the mission remained an outpost effectively ruled from London, but the islands were now the site of considerable Pacific trade and a battle for political and military supremacy between French agents and Tahitians. British missionaries tried to block France through their influence with Tahitian nobles. It was against this backdrop that Simpson's sexual attacks on the female students of the missionary school were finally revealed. Complaints were laid; reports and correspondence began flooding into the London Missionary Society headquarters, where the charges were considered and the outcome decided. Over two chapters in Emily J. Manktelow's new study, we follow the minutiae of this process, learning that alliances and arguments formed first in favor of Simpson, as many fathers and brothers believed their colleague over their daughters and sisters.

Manktelow's analysis of this event is both innovative and wide-ranging, as much a meditation on history writing as on the events of Tahiti in the mid-nineteenth century. Her primary method is micro-history, the episodic approach. This is especially valuable for the analysis of trials, where the structures of power are most clearly exposed. She knows that the archives are potent places where privilege is embedded not merely in the white hands, largely male, who put pen to paper to construct narratives in their own defense, but also in the maintenance of records and the very buildings in which these documents are housed.

Manktelow's explicit reflection on contemporary events for the writing of this history is powerful and engaging. Her historiography of sexual violence begins with Susan Brownmiller's landmark study on rape, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), and the subsequent debate on the prevalence of this abuse through history. As Manktelow was struggling with this book, the #MeToo movement revealed the extent of gendered sexual bullying and abuse, so this, too, fed into the analysis, along with statistics on rape in England and Wales from 2015. She deployed the same method to uncover the history of sexual violence specifically against children, finding the past echoed in the recent celebrity cases of Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris.

Manktelow's deep subjectivity ensures the book is not only a polemic. She examines her own doubts as well as the considerable archive covering the events in Tahiti. She mulls over the letters from Simpson's wife protesting his innocence and those from Simpson's supporters, who exploited possible weaknesses in the girls’ stories, particularly the long delay in the reporting of the abuse. Manktelow explores the suspicion of missionary children seemingly tainted by their close association with Tahitians and the power of gossip in small societies where punishment was meted out by a distant administration.

In the final chapter, Manktelow focuses on the legacies of British colonialism and efforts to shore up the myth of the benevolent civilizing empire by hiding damming documents, particularly those relating to the Mau in Kenya. Again, the prose is thoughtful and the ideas are powerful. This chapter might have been strengthened, however, by some analysis of the current Tahitian struggle with French colonialism. The conclusion reminds the reader that the book is thin on the broader politics of Tahiti of the mid-nineteenth century and of the present. The central events of this book took place in the lead-up to French annexation of Tahiti. Yet British imperialism and colonialism provide the key thrust of Manktelow's approach and the source of most of her literature. Manktelow's exemplary analysis of sexual violence in the second chapter, which demonstrates so vividly the power of exploring the past from an explicit analysis of the present, was not brought to bear on the present political realities of French Polynesia. There is no discussion, therefore, of how the Macron administration continues to defy both United Nation resolutions and Tahitian demands for real autonomy and perhaps independence in the future.

Despite these concerns, this is an admirable book, notable for Manktelow's method, poised and balanced prose, and finely crafted and thoughtful analysis. Manktelow's focus on communities of mission, thousands of miles from home, and the grinding disputes that ate away at the tight circle of congregation, is a welcome move in the study of empire. She harnesses the slow burn of her anger and her subjectivity to provide a masterclass, for the most part, in how to write the past from the present.