Legacies

Abstract

By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna massacre had become the linchpin of the British Empire, explaining why the British came to have a stronghold in India. This chapter looks at a convergence of circumstances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the new availability of historical sources, the rise of imperial history as an academic subject, and the crisis of empire posed by the Boer War, to explore the centrality of Amboyna in British history. Works of history and children’s schoolbooks are key sources. The triumph of the Amboyna Massacre—in British history and culture, in reference works, in modern library subject classification systems—reveals that the English at Amboyna may have lost their heads, but they got the last word.