Gender, Violence, and Criminal Justice in the Colonial Pacific, 1880–1920 is an original and perceptive study of colonial law and sexual violence in the Pacific. Kate Stevens analyzes colonial court proceedings and legal practices beyond the courts, tracing the legal engagement of multiple groups in New Caledonia, Fiji, and Vanuatu between 1880 and 1920. She shows that discourses on race and gender influenced colonial officials’ experiments with legal policy; shaped the legal actions of missionaries, naval officers, and planters; and infused the strategies and expressions of Indigenous Islanders as they pursued justice.

In the introduction, Stevens explains her goals of exposing “alternative spaces of lawmaking” (2) and mapping the intricate, often volatile, relations of officials and Islanders, while also paying close attention to gendered and racialized experiences. Writing a history of sex crimes from this perspective exposes, Stevens suggests, the limits of colonial law. Authorities encountered colonialism’s inability to fully regulate Indigenous and intimate lives. Islanders came up against the limits of the law in practices that privileged some kinds of evidence over others and perpetuated inequalities beyond the courts.

Stevens organizes her rich material in two parts, one centered on colonial courts and the other on legal practices outside courts. A scene-setting chapter 1 surveys legal changes in New Caledonia, Fiji, and Vanuatu and carefully explains their divergent forms of governance: New Caledonia sprouted the Indigénat regime; indirect rule took hold in Fiji; and a peculiar form of condominium by British and French empires emerged in Vanuatu, then called the New Hebrides. Here, as elsewhere, Stevens is attentive to historical differences while also highlighting shared legal processes.

Two chapters probe experiences of colonial criminal justice. Chapter 2 spotlights courtroom theatricality. As Stevens notes, legal historians have long recognized that courtrooms serve as sites of the performance of sovereign power and its critiques. Unsurprisingly, she finds that courtroom rituals and performance functioned “to reinforce European imperial authority” (83). She also offers a highly original discussion of the use of satire in lampooning courtroom procedures and language.

In an elegant chapter, Stevens explores gender and race in trials of sexual crimes. Perceptions of Indigenous women as unreliable witnesses took shape alongside a growing reliance on medical evidence in trials for rape and sexual assault. Detailed sources about court cases in Fiji support the characterization of a broader pattern of the “medicalization and moralization of gender violence” (110). Colonial officials increasingly represented courtrooms as spaces of rationality offering mechanisms for truth-finding. Rather than treating this discourse as intrinsic to colonial governmentality, Stevens connects it to perceptions of racial and gender hierarchies and their influence. She explores Indigenous women’s perspectives as they reported and described sexual assault and its effects. Taken together, Stevens concludes, narratives about sexual crimes presented a sharp contrast between upholding scientific evidence as objective and labeling Indigenous witnesses and defendants as irrational and excitable.

Stevens then pivots to the law outside the courtroom. Part two begins with a chapter about attempts at the management, by multiple groups, of intimate relationships. In Franceville, a tiny community in the New Hebrides that declared itself an autonomous polity under the protection of the British and French empires, local and colonial legal reform converged to restructure criminal justice. Elsewhere, missionaries maneuvered to bring the law into alignment with “Christian morality and sexuality” (139). As these examples indicate, multiple groups sought control over sexuality and morality in aid of their own interests and goals. Debates about criminal justice and sexual violence, meanwhile, widened to encompass inter-imperial and regional discourse. Stevens explores these multi-level processes in two compact case studies, one set in a New Hebridean hospital and another involving accusations of white sexual violence against indentured and migrant women in Fiji. A particularly interesting claim is that approaches to sexual violence revealed a “conscious strategy” (195) by officials to limit the reach of colonial jurisdiction in Indigenous communities.

To illustrate how law and violence were intertwined in arenas beyond the courts, Stevens investigates arbitrary tribunals and naval intervention. In New Caledonia, the Indigénat regime generated harsh punishments, including exile and internment, through tribunals operating beyond colonial courts. Such forums, when they took up sex crimes, amplified discourse about Kanak society as uncivilized. In a similar vein, naval personnel acted as legal agents when they judged and punished Islanders for violence against Europeans. Such measures included collective punishment, even though naval officials claimed to be responding to individual acts of violence rather than to political resistance. Although Stevens is attentive to women as casualties of navy violence, sex and crime recede as objects of analysis in this section.

It is somewhat disappointing that in a comparative study of this quality Stevens stops short of advancing an overarching argument about sexual violence and criminal law in the colonial Pacific. Insights about the limits of colonial law come closest, but they are not thoroughly developed. Oddly, the lens of legal pluralism might have gotten in the way. By separating courts from other legal arenas and by offering close analyses of multiple sets of legal practices, Stevens’s approach shifts attention away from jurisdictional politics and broad patterns of legal change. The labeling of some practices “beyond the law” (125), in other words, cuts against the expansive view of law that Stevens endorses in the introduction. Legal actions by navy captains and adjudication in tribunals, for example, are situated in “alternative spaces” (2) of law, but the analysis shows them to be integral parts of imperial and inter-imperial regimes.

There remains no doubt that Stevens has made a very valuable contribution by placing sex and gender violence at the center of Pacific colonial history. The implicit challenge is to extend this reorientation to other regional and global legal histories. As scholars travel along this path, they will benefit from Stevens’s efforts to mark the way.