In 1623, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) beheaded twenty-one men on charges of conspiracy and treason in a public execution. Ten of the condemned were employees of the English East India Company (EIC) who had been trading in the Moluccas, better known as the Spice Islands, alongside their Dutch counterparts since the beginning of the century. The incident was hardly the most outrageous mass violence in the region’s tumultuous past. Nevertheless, the EIC dubbed the episode the “Amboyna Massacre,” which gained remarkable significance in various historical writings and unexpected longevity in the British culture in the following centuries. Alison Games’s monograph Inventing the English Massacre is the latest scholarly inquiry into the ambiguous conspiracy and the episode’s long afterlife, spanning British imperial history.

荷兰殖民帝国的日常运作和印尼各种反殖民势力的活动都大大超越了“荷属东印度”这一地理范畴，而印度洋则是两者进行政治角力的重要场域。本文从海洋视角切入，对二十世纪上半叶的印尼反殖民运动进行反思。本文旨在跳出把陆地空间作为基本框架的传统叙事模式，思考反殖民运动中的去地域化因素。本文指出，高速发展的全球航运网络促进了人员、思想、商品的跨洋流动，对各地民族主义的产生及反殖民运动的发展产生了巨大的推动作用，但对这种影响的探讨却长期淹没于把殖民地或民族国家陆地疆域作为分析单位、且带有强烈的目的论倾向的历史书写之中。对跨洋网络等去地域化因素加以研究，有助于突破殖民地与民族国家的“束身衣”，重新审视二十世纪民族主义在殖民世界兴起与发展的历史进程。

A panel discussion on "Empire and Regional Order", in which I discussed two related issues: 1. how to do research on the history of regional politics? 2. how to make sense of the unwritten by following what Ann Laura Stoler called “archival grains”.