The New Black Legend: England’s Violent Colonial Competition with the Dutch

The predominance of African slave labor on plantations in English and Dutch colonies over the course of the seventeenth century highlights the violent competition for trade profits in this era. Almost half a century after the incident, Dryden’s Amboyna works to refresh the memory of traumatic events in Anglo-Dutch mercantile competition for English audiences. Rather than using her romance to criticize her nation’s participation in the global trade in African slaves, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko combines nostalgia and traumatic memory to warn English readers about the violent Dutch on the eve of the Glorious Revolution. The operation of trauma and nostalgia enables English participation in violent practices they think they would avoid, pointing to the power of commercial competition to contribute to an imagined national interest.