Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory, Games Alison

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 storys 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 Massacres 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.