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Guido van Meersbergen, Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory, by Alison Games, The English Historical Review, Volume 137, Issue 589, December 2022, Pages 1833–1834, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac231
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For almost exactly four centuries, in the anglophone world, the mere mention of the word ‘Amboyna’ has conjured up gruesome images of a massacre. While most people familiar with the phrase ‘Amboyna Massacre’ would be hard-pressed to recount the details of what happened on the island of Ambon in 1623, there is a good chance that they recall those events as having been cruel and bloody, perhaps as the barbarous slaughter of innocent Englishmen at the hands of their cunning rivals of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The process by which the execution of ten English traders, alongside nine or ten Japanese soldiers and an Indo-Portuguese overseer of slaves, became transformed into a foundational, and specifically English, ‘massacre’, forms the topic of Alison Games’s book. In a deeply researched and highly readable account, Games charts both how the intimate and anxiety-ridden world of early modern colonial trade created the conditions for an alleged conspiracy to turn into a major international incident, and how it gave rise to a set of lasting visual and mental images whose cultural importance resonated far beyond its original context.
