Chapter 4 focuses on the representation of Anglo-Dutch relations from Asia to America in the seventeenth century. The chapter analyzes the representation of an incident in 1623 on the spice island Amboyna when Dutch traders tortured (with waterboarding) and killed their English rivals in the East Indies. Decades later, New England writers returning to this incident, treating it as news, invoked anti-English violence half a world away to lay claim to a global English identity. The chapter compares visual representation of the Amboyna incident with John Underhill’s “figure” of the Mystic Fort massacre in New England, arguing that these representations of violence are key elements of colonial fantasies that made (and make) real atrocities possible. The coda discusses Stephen Bradwell’s 1633 first-aid manual, partly inspired by the Amboyna incident, which maintains that properly trained, authorized metropolitan authorities can control the potential dangers of the remedies torture and tobacco.
Skilled migration and global English
