Review: Gender, Violence and Criminal Justice in the Colonial Pacific, 1880–1920, by Kate Stevens

In Gender, Violence and Criminal Justice in the Colonial Pacific, 1880–1920, Kate Stevens analyzes legal archives to reveal the texture of British and French colonial rule in three sites in the Pacific: New Caledonia, Fiji, and Vanuatu (the New Hebrides Condominium). The scope of Stevens’s work is not defined by European imperial boundaries: French- and British-ruled colonies in the Pacific were enmeshed by trade and other connections and, as Stevens points out in her introduction, considering them together creates a fuller and more complex picture of colonial rule. The book’s specific focus is on cases involving sexual violence. Stevens analyzes these cases for what they reveal about hierarchies of gender, race, and status, the local negotiations of justice, and the lived experiences of colonial rule. This book is part of a new series from Bloomsbury Academic, Empire’s Other Histories. According to the publisher, the series explores the “marginalised, dispossessed...