Inventing the English Massacre confirms Alison Games's place as an indispensible and extraordinarily versatile chronicler of the early modern English empire. Elegantly conceived and meticulously researched, the book offers an entirely fresh perspective on a long misunderstood episode in imperial history. By investigating not only what happened in 1623 in Ambon, when English and Dutch spice traders bloodily collided, but what later generations
thought had happened, Games brilliantly connects the intrigue, violence, and sheer confusion of European competition in seventeenth-century southeast Asia to the myth-making of British imperialists well into the twentieth.
Alison Games is the Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History at Georgetown University. She is the author of numerous books, including Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (1999), The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (OUP, 2008), and Witchcraft in Early North America (2010).