Inventing the English Massacre : Amboyna in History and Memory

This book tells the story of the causes and legacies of a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese plotters against Dutch spice traders in the Indian Ocean in 1623. In the wake of the torture and execution of the accused men, the incident became known in Europe as the Amboyna Massacre. I trace the creation and memory of the Amboyna Massacre over four hundred years, providing a new interpretation of a poorly understood episode once believed by historians to have changed the course of British history. It did, but not as people once thought: instead, it became the first English massacre and this new history of the Amboyna Massacre explains why we associate massacres with intimacy, treachery, and cruelty.

My Lai, Wounded Knee, Sandy Hook: the place names evoke grief and horror, each the site of a massacre. Massacres-the mass slaughter of people-might seem as old as time, but the word itself is not. It worked its way into the English language in the late sixteenth century, and ultimately came to signify a specific type of death, one characterized by cruelty, intimacy, and treachery. How that happened is the story of yet another place, Amboyna, an island in the Indonesian archipelago where English and Dutch merchants fought over the spice trade. There a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese plotters took place in 1623 and led to the beheading of more than a dozen men in a public execution. Inventing the English Massacre shows how the English East India Company transformed that conspiracy into a massacre through printed works, both books and images, which ensured the story''s tenacity over four centuries. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone and a term that needed no further explanation. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre''s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. Drawing on archival documents in Dutch, French, and English, Alison Games masterfully recovers the history, ramifications, and afterlives of this event, which shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence and made intimacy, treachery, and cruelty indelibly connected with massacres.