Clulow, Adam

English

Texas ScholarWorks

The past is never dead. It's not even pastNOT EVEN PASTSearch the site ...   Like 13 TweetPrimary Source: Pamphlets,Propaganda, and the AmboinaConspiracy Trial in the ClassroomThis and other articles in Primary Source: History from the Ransom CenterStacks represent an ongoing partnership between Not Even Past and the HarryRansom Center, a world-renowned humanities research library and museum at TheUniversity of Texas at Austin. Visit the Center’s website to learn more about itscollections and get involved.For more than a decade now I have been researching and teaching about the Amboina(Amboyna) trial. This was an enormously controversial conspiracy case that took placeon a remote island in Indonesia but involving a global list of characters includingJapanese mercenaries, English o cials, Dutch merchants, slaves from South Asia andlocal polities. In 1623, Dutch authorities accused a group of English East India Companymerchants and Japanese soldiers of plotting to seize a Dutch East India Company fortand with it control over the trade in precious spices. The alleged conspirators werearrested, tortured and based on their confessions subsequently executed.  By the timethe trial concluded, a total of twenty-one men were dead, beheaded by Dutch East IndiaCompany (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) authorities.The trial is important for two reasons. First, there is a still unresolved question over theguilt or innocence of the alleged conspirators. For close to four hundred years now,scholars and popular writers have been debating just what happened on this island: whowas guilty, who was innocent and what it all means. Historians writing in English havegenerally insisted that no plot existed and hence that the VOC had no basis to execute agroup of English merchants and their supposed Japanese collaborators. In contrast,most Dutch historians argue that there was some sort of conspiracy and, because ofthis, that the Company had every right to take judicial action. While this debate shows no signs of ending, Amboina is also important for a secondreason: it became the centerpiece of a long propaganda campaign waged by the EnglishEast India Company that turned what happened on this remote island into a symbol ofDutch treachery, cruelty and betrayal.The trialThe Amboina case generated a vast archive of court records, depositions and othermaterials spanning more than  ve thousand pages. But because so many witnesseswere on the payroll of either the Dutch or English companies, the archive offers littleclarity about the possible conspiracy and the trial itself. Instead, putting together thedifferent versions of the case creates a dizzying Rashomon-like kaleidoscope of Privacy  - Termspossible interpretations. While working on what would become my book, Amboina,1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire, I decided to develop a specializedteaching website designed to take the case into the classroom. My impetus for this website came from watching my students talk about a long-concluded trial in a different part of the world. What I was witnessing was theremarkable worldwide response to the groundbreaking  rst season of the podcastSerial, which focused on a 1999 murder case in Baltimore. Serial became the mostdownloaded podcast in history, and it generated a tremendous response as the publiclogged vast numbers of hours working through the key pieces of evidence.Screen-capture from the website for the  rst episode of Serial, Season One:Episode 01.Listening to Serial, I began to wonder if I couldn’t do something similar (on a far smallerscale) for my classroom: what would it be like to make primary source documentsrelated to the 1623 trial freely available for students to dig into and interpret, puttingforward their own conclusions about what happened? Working with the Roy RosenzweigCenter for History and New Media at George Mason University, I built an interactivewebsite, The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, designed to do just that. Screen-capture of the homepage of The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial.At the heart of the site is an interactive trial engine which places students at the centerof the case. To make a complex trial more accessible, we boiled the controversy downto six key questions that have to be answered one way or the other in order to come to averdict. For each question, the site presents the arguments mobilized by both sides, theprosecution and defense, in conjunction with the most important pieces of evidence,related documents and legal commentary from a distinguished trial attorney. In addition,we created a large repository of additional material and documents, which students canwork through at their own pace to support their conclusions.The site became the centerpiece of classes I taught on the rise of the Dutch and Englishchartered companies in the seventeenth-century and their competition over preciousspices. Students were challenged to work through large quantities of seventeenth-century primary source material online before taking on one of four roles—Barrister(Attorney), Witness, Researcher or Judge—in a comprehensive and competitiveexamination of the original trial. The exercise produced some of the most excitingclasses I have taught. Students pored over the minutiae of the case and came to classprepared to debate their conclusions.The trial exercise proved so successful in part because it harnessed a familiar genre:True Crime and the dissection of a single criminal case and subsequent trial. Studentsknow this genre intimately, and once they are confronted with an archive of this kind Ihave found that they tend to dive right in. But Amboina is also important because itseeped into the English popular imagination for decades after the trial concluded. Thispart, the long legacy of the Amboina trial in print and image, has always been far moredi cult to teach.The long legacyWhen news of the case reached Europe around May 1624, it sparked immediateoutrage. Passions were in amed by the publication of a slew of incendiary pamphlets onboth sides that sought either to damn the Dutch as bloody tyrants or condemn theEnglish as faithless traitors. While both companies pushed their own version of the case,the English East India Company scored the greatest successes. By any measure, theEnglish East India Company waged an extraordinarily successful propaganda campaignagainst its Dutch counterpart. This is brilliantly discussed in Alison Games’ recent book,Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory, which shows howsuccessive generations of English writers came to invoke “Amboyna as a shorthand toconvey cruelty and betrayal without comment or elaboration, so certain were they thattheir readers would understand the signi cance of the word.”The propaganda campaign took many forms. The English East India Companycommissioned a “very large picture, wherein is set forth those several lively, largelyarti cially bloody tortures and executions in icted upon our people at Amboyna.” But itskey instrument was a printed pamphlet, a relatively cheap publication that was printedagain and again, often with an illustration of the English being brutally tortured.The  rst shots of the pamphlet war were  red by VOC supporters in a short publication,Waerachtich Verhael vande Tidinghen ghecomen wt de Oost-Indien, that was  rstpublished in July 1624 and later translated into English as A True Declaration of theNews that Came Out of the East Indies. Widely believed to be the work of a senior Dutcho cial, it denounced the “abominable conspiracy” while offering a measured defense ofthe legal proceedings. The English Company was quick to respond, commissioning Atrue relation of the unjust, cruell, and barbarous proceedings against the English atAmboyna in the East-Indies, by the Neatherlandish gouernour and councel there, whichwas compiled on the basis of the testimony provided by the handful of survivors of thetrial who had made their way to England. A truerelation ofthe vnivst,crvell, andbarbarovsproceedingsagainst theEnglish atAmboyna inthe East-Indies(London:NathanaelNewberry,1624), sigs.π1r and B1r.HarryRansomCenterBookCollection,DS 646.6 E21624b.True Relation proved an enormously successful and durable text. It took a complex trialand turned it into a straightforward and compelling story in which the “unsatiablecovetousnesse of the Hollanders” had driven them to engineer a “cruell treacherie togain the sole trade” in precious spices. It reimagined a disparate and largelyundistinguished group of British merchants as pious martyrs united by their Protestantfaith and it included a potent woodcut image showing an unnamed English merchantbeing tortured with water and candles while another kneels in prayer, ready forexecution. As Anthony Milton has shown, such depictions, which seem to have drawn onan early edition of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, con rmed the English in Amboina intheir new role as righteous martyrs. The 1624 True Relation was endlessly printed,modi ed, retitled and reprinted for the rest of the seventeenth century, making it anextraordinarily successful weapon in the English Company’s campaign to place blameand win compensation for what had happened on Amboina.A truerelation ofthe vnivst,crvell, andbarbarovsproceedingsagainst theEnglish atAmboyna inthe East-Indies(London:NathanaelNewberry,1624), sig.“E3″2. HarryRansomCenterBookCollection,DS 646.6 E21624b.John Foxe,The  rst [-second]volume of theecclesiasticallhistory,contayningthe Actes &monumentes(London:John Daye,1576), sig.TT6v. HarryRansomCenter BookCollection, -q-BR 1600 F61576.While these printed books underpinned a sharp deterioration in Anglo-Dutch relations, itis a struggle to get students interested in poor-quality PDFs of old pamphlets. In Spring2020, however, I tried something different. With Aaron T. Pratt, the Carl and LilyPforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center, Icombed through the Center’s vast collection for everything connected to Amboina andlaid out what we found around a group of large seminar tables.It proved a revelation. By the time we were done, the students could see before them inconcrete form an extraordinarily successful propaganda campaign as represented by aseries of interlocking texts that all borrowed from each other. Beginning with the 1624True Relation, the display showed how an image was formed, how it was entrenchedwith key symbols and how it was subtly manipulated over time, appearing each time in aslightly different form. In 1651, for example, the same basic pamphlet was reprinted fora new audience.A truerelation ofthe unjust,cruel, andbarbarousproceedingsagainst theEnglishat Amboynain the East-Indies(London:WilliamHope,1651).HarryRansomCenterBookCollection,DS 646.6 E21651.In 1665 it was republished again, and in 1672, close to  fty years after the original trial, anew version promised to reveal “the naked truth of this cause, hirtherto masked, mu edand obfuscated”.  True Relation spawned a host of sub-texts, too. In 1673, for example, John Dryden wrotethe charges against the Dutch into a play, Amboyna: A tragedy. Damning the Dutch asbloody murderers, the play gave a new generation the chance to discover, as one stagedirection put it, “the English tortured, and the Dutch tormenting them.” And Dryden threwin new crimes, accusing the Dutch of rape and cannibalism.By the 1680s, Amboina had not lost its potency even though half a century had passedsince the trial itself. The Center has a remarkable text from 1683 entitled Unparallel’dvarieties: or, the matchless actions and passions of mankind. Displayed in near fourhundred notable instances and examples. This introduced a new and evolving image ofAmboina. Here the English were not simply righteous martyrs. Instead, their judicialmurder had been marked by a sign of divine wrath from the heavens. In this retelling,which drew from part of the True Relation but gave it new form, the execution of theEnglish merchants in Kota Ambon was accompanied by “a great darknesse, with asudden and violent gust of winde and tempest” that almost wrecked the Dutch shipsclustered in the harbor. This was followed by a terrible illness that “swept away about athousand people, Dutch and Amboyners.” The meaning of such signs was unmistakable.They were “a token of the wrath of God for this barbarous tyranny of the Hollanders.” In1683, all of this was included in a new image paired alongside one drawn from theoriginal 1624 woodblock print. Like its predecessor, this image had a long life and wasreprinted in 1712 as part of a new text, The History of the Barbarous Cruelties. There canbe little question as to what it would have meant to the reader. Here we see God’s wrathat the top of the image in response to what the Dutch have done in the lower half.The history ofthebarbarouscruelties andmassacres,committed bythe Dutch inthe East-Indies(London andRECENT POSTSIHS Podcast: Hungry for RevolutionThe McFarland Cuban Plantation RecordsIHS Podcast – Episode 3: “Apache Diaspora in four hundred years of colonialism vs ‘Toltec Antiquities’ Diaspora in EarlyRepublican Mexico”Workshop: “The Mexican Empire and Indigenous Texas, 1821-1823” by Sheena Cox, University of Texas at AustinThis is Democracy: Shadow Docket and AbortionNOT EVEN PAST is produced byThe Department of HistoryTHE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN We are supported by the College of Liberal ArtsAnd our READERSDONATECONTACTAll content © 2010-present NOT EVEN PAST and the authors, unless otherwise notedSign up to receive the monthly Not Even Past newsletterWestminster:n.p., 1712),frontispieceand sig. A1r.HarryRansomCenter BookCollection, DS642 H25.We live in a digital world. This trend has become even more pronounced now as theCOVID-19 pandemic has forced us out of in-person seminar spaces and into Zoomclassrooms. But there remains something immensely powerful about encounteringoriginal documents right in front of your eyes, in seeing how an image morphs andevolves in print and in standing around a table with a series of interlocked texts arrayedin front of you. This is the joy of having something like the Ransom Center on campus. Itis a reminder of how lucky we are as historians to have this incredible resource availableto us and our students.Adam Clulow is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is theauthor of The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan(Columbia University Press, 2014), which won multiple awards including the JerryBentley Prize in World History from the American Historical Association, and Amboina,1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019). Heis creator of The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, an online interactive trial engine thatreceived the New South Wales Premiers History Award in 2017, and Virtual Angkor withTom Chandler, which received the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History.Posted November 24, 2020More Features, Monthly Features, Primary Source:Your email addressSUBSCRIBEFEATURES BOOKS TEACHING DIGITAL & FILMBLOG IHS TEXAS SPOTLIGHTABOUT

Primary Source: Pamphlets, Propaganda, and the Amboina Conspiracy Trial in the Classroom

https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/2152/87925/2/Primary%20Source_%20Pamphlets%2c%20Propaganda%2c%20and%20the%20Amboina%20Conspiracy%20Trial%20in%20the%20Classroom%20-%20Not%20Even%20P.pdf

Primary Source: Pamphlets, Propaganda, and the Amboina Conspiracy Trial in the Classroom

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Texas ScholarWorks