Ysabinda and the Spice Race: Reading the Body and the Indian Ocean World in Dryden’s Amboyna
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines the gendered and colonial implications of the Amboyna Massacre of 1623 and it was played out in John Dryden's reconstruction of it almost fifty years later in his play Amboyna (1673). Written and performed during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, Dryden's play allows us to access the complex political rivalries that marked the Indian Ocean World during the early modern period. The English East India Company (EIC) and the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) were engaged in what we would recognize as the Spice Race - the struggle to control the lucrative spice producing regions in the Indian Ocean. Dryden dramatizes this race and its accompanying violence by resorting to well entrenched gendered tropes that accompanied colonial strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".