CASE
Our initial experiment with this format was constructed around a famous, and still controversial, seventeenth-century case, the Amboyna Conspiracy Trial.1 This commenced on February 23, 1623, when a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC), was arrested for asking questions about the defenses of one of the company’s forts on the island of Ambon (often referred to as Amboyna in this period) in modern-day Indonesia. When he failed to provide an adequate explanation, he was tortured using a technique we now know as waterboarding. The result was a confession that Shichizō had joined a plot orchestrated by a group of English merchants to seize control of the fortification and, ultimately, to rip the spice-rich island from the company’s grasp. Armed with this information, the VOC governor proceeded to arrest, interrogate, and torture the remaining ten Japanese mercenaries in the garrison, all of whom eventually admitted to their involvement in the plot. A few days later, the governor’s attention turned to the English. Under torture, they too confessed to a conspiracy aimed at seizing the fort and ejecting the Dutch from Ambon. On March 9, an improvised tribunal of VOC employees convened to render judgment on the conspirators. The result was an emphatic guilty verdict, and, shortly thereafter, ten English merchants and ten Japanese mercenaries were executed in the public square outside the fortress.
The Amboyna case became immediately and immensely controversial. When news of what had happened reached London at the end of May 1624, it sparked outrage from the directors of the English East India Company, the king, and, by all accounts, the general public. Passions were further inflamed by the publication of a slew of incendiary pamphlets produced by both sides that sought to either damn the Dutch as bloody tyrants or condemn the English as faithless traitors. The result was that, despite occurring thousands of miles away in an unfamiliar part of the world, the trial on Amboyna swiftly escalated to become one of the most famous legal cases of its age and the subject of a long-running dispute between the Dutch and English governments, which clashed bitterly over the twin issues of blame and compensation.
The controversies produced by Amboyna combined to generate a sprawling archive that runs to more than five thousand pages of original documents scattered across the British Library in London, the National Archives in Kew, and the Nationaal Archief in The Hague. Despite this vast trove of materials, there is as yet no consensus as to what actually happened on Amboyna. For close to four centuries, scholars have debated whether there was in fact a plot to seize control of the castle and, hence, if the English merchants and Japanese mercenaries on Amboyna were innocent or guilty of the charges against them. After years of wrestling with these questions, we decided to try a different approach to the Amboyna case by turning it into an interactive classroom exercise designed to generate student engagement.
AMBOYNA ONLINE
Inspired by the public reaction to the groundbreaking podcast Serial, which had succeeded in drawing unprecedented attention to a previously obscure murder case, we decided to put the case online. We created a new digital humanities platform, the Amboyna Conspiracy Trial (www.amboyna.org) with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. (See fig. 5.1.)
At the center of the site, we placed an interactive trial engine called What’s Your Verdict that presented the most compelling evidence offered by the Dutch East India Company, which we dubbed the prosecution, and their English opponents, the defense. To make a complex trial accessible, we boiled the case down to six key questions that have to be answered one way or the other in order to come to a verdict. For each question, the site presents the arguments mobilized by the prosecution and defense in conjunction with their most important pieces of evidence. As part of the process, we asked a distinguished London-based barrister to work through the material. Generously agreeing to waive his fees, he reviewed an extensive series of Amboyna files and then sat through hour after hour of filmed interviews, in which he guided students through the key questions any prospective juror would have to wrestle with. Finally, we created a large repository of additional material and documents related to the case.
The site went online in 2016 and since then thousands of visitors have worked their way through the trial engine, with the results all recorded in our database. Once the site was functioning properly, we combined it with a new trials-based exercise intended for the undergraduate classroom.
RESTAGING A HISTORICAL TRIAL
The mock trial exercise was staged initially with a second-year history class consisting of approximately a hundred students, who were divided into five tutorials of around twenty students each. We assigned individual roles to each of the students: three were judges, two were witnesses for the prosecution, two were witnesses for the defense, three were part of the legal team for the prosecution, three for the defense team, and the remaining students were assigned as researchers for the two sides. For the roles, allocations, and responsibilities, see table 5.1.
Figure 5.1. The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial website.
Table 5.1. Roles, Allocations, and Responsibilities for History Class Activity
| Role | Allocations | Responsibilities |
| Attorney/Barrister | Three for prosecutionThree for defense | Prepare a briefing on key exhibitsInterview witnesses during pretrial preparationOpening statementsExamination and cross-examination of witnessesClosing statements |
| Researcher | Three for prosecutionThree for defense | Review and analyze evidencePrepare briefing papers for barristersDevelop overall strategyProvide additional evidence and suggestions through the trial via notes |
| Witness | Two for prosecutionTwo for defense | Research a specific historical characterWork with either the prosecution or the defenseDeliver testimony before the court and undergo questioning |
| Judge | Three to four total | Prepare for the trial, develop familiarity with the legal system of the periodKeep order in the court, oversee barristersAsk questions of barristers and witnessesDeliver a verdictPrepare a written justification |
The mock trial exercise ran across three weeks. The first week was devoted to research and preparation as students started to work through the key materials. During the second week, this process continued but the legal teams were also required to present oral arguments before the judges. These centered on a number of controversial exhibits including a legal justification of waterboarding prepared by a VOC official and an unverified note smuggled out from the original trial. The question before the judges was whether these exhibits, which significantly strengthened one of the two sides, should be admitted into the record. In this way, their inclusion or exclusion had the capacity to alter the overall course of the trial. In the third week, we staged the trial itself, which was divided into five stages: opening statements, witnesses for the prosecution, witnesses for the defense, closing statements, and verdict. When the trial concluded, the judges prepared a written statement explaining their verdict.
RESULTS
Although it required some initial explanation, the exercise proved highly successful. By tapping into students’ competitive instincts, it generated a high level of engagement. Students who had previously been reluctant to look closely at weekly readings were willing to devote long hours outside the classroom to the case. Both the prosecution and the defense organized extensive meetings outside tutorial time to work through content, devise arguments, and prepare their legal strategies. This level of engagement extended across all four groups: researchers worked through all the documents on the website and then searched for further evidence; witnesses engaged deeply with their characters; legal teams prepared eloquent written statements and practiced their delivery; and the judges delved into the legal systems of the period and mastered the arcane rules regulating the use of torture in the seventeenth century. The overall experience proved enormously gratifying for us as instructors, and many students singled it out as the high point of the class.
IS IT REPLICABLE?
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