John Dryden's Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English (1673) is an English imperial drama set on Ambon, an island located in the Banda Sea of the Malay Archipelago in twenty-first century Indonesia. For three acts, the play focuses on the political and commercial intrigues of Dutch and English merchants on Amboyna; in the fourth act, the play's only speaking Indigenous character—the “Indian” Ysabinda—is dragged offstage and raped by the Dutch Governor's son; in the final act, the English are tortured by Dutch forces bent on breaking entirely the East India Company's economic foothold in the region. While Amboyna has recently been understood as a propagandist record of the first English “massacre,” those “cruelties” are not the play's only focus, nor its animating one. Even in the horrific final acts, and certainly before, Dryden's play is concerned with the political management of oceanic space, oceanic resources, and oceanic peoples. As the anthropologist Epeli Hauʻofa has written of colonialism elsewhere in the Pacific: Amboyna, its author, and his patron are involved directly or indirectly in the creation of an exploitative geopolitics of the East Indies “for the purposes of which it is necessary to portray our huge world in tiny, needy bits.”