Celebes (modern Sulawesi) is the large K-shaped island of the Indonesian archipelago lying between Borneo and the Moluccas, east of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. In the AcehWiki corpus the island — more precisely its southern portion, Zuid-Celebes (Southern Celebes, modern Sulawesi Selatan), with its principal port of Makassar — appears in two distinct comparative contexts: as one of the “outlying Dutch possessions” cited by the Dutch scholar L. W. C. van den Berg in his discussion of the adat of dividing common earnings between husband and wife, treated at length in Snouck Hurgronje’s The Achehnese (Vol. I, 1906); and as the source of Makassaarsch zout (Makassarese salt) in P. H. van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 (1900), where its cheap salt had for years supplied the East Coast of Sumatra and the rest of the Outer Possessions, frustrating the Dutch government’s monopoly hopes. Both appearances situate Celebes as a comparative reference point within Aceh-focused scholarly literature.
Van den Berg’s “specially Javanese” adat — Snouck Hurgronje’s reference
Snouck Hurgronje’s reference to Southern Celebes comes in his chapter on the law of property in marriage in The Achehnese Vol. I, in the course of a sharp criticism of Van den Berg’s essay on the Afwijkingen (“deviations”) from Mohammedan law in Netherlands-India. After observing that in Acheh, as in Java, Madura, and “most Malayan countries,” the property accumulated during a marriage by the respective toil of husband and wife is divided in equal shares between them on divorce, Snouck turns to Van den Berg’s account of the same usage.
“Van den Berg mentions this adat in his essay on the Afwijkingen, pp. 474 et seq. In regard to this subject he makes fewer of the gross blunders into which he elsewhere falls, but here again he gives us nothing but what he has derived from books without a trace of ‘notes personally made by him.’ He might for instance have discovered by personal enquiry that the exceptions he mentions (Banten and a number of other places) are really no exceptions at all; the only reason why the saguna-sakaya or common earnings are not divided in these districts is that they have no existence, since the women there do not assist their husbands in their work.”
Snouck’s specific reference to Southern Celebes comes in his refutation of Van den Berg’s inference that the adat was specially Javanese: “He might also have found out that the division in the proportion of 2 to 1, though of frequent occurrence, is by no means universal, since in many places it is the custom to enquire first into the circumstances, and then to decide what is the just proportion which each has earned. In Madiun for instance, division into equal parts is very customary. On page 477 Van den Berg makes the curious deduction that this adat is specially Javanese, because it is also to be met with in outlying Dutch possessions such as Southern Celebes.”
The point of the criticism is that Van den Berg reasoned backwards: from the presence of the adat in outlying Dutch possessions like Southern Celebes, he concluded that the usage must be Javanese in origin. Snouck, by contrast, treats it as a widespread Malayan usage with no specially Javanese character. Southern Celebes thus appears in Vol. I not for its own sake but as a comparative example illustrating the breadth of a custom — the equal division of the saguna-sakaya — that Snouck regards as common to the entire Malay-Indonesian world. Its mention alongside Acheh, Java, Madura, Madiun, and Banten reflects the comparative method by which Snouck sought to distinguish what was specifically Achehnese from what was common to the wider Malayan region.
Makassarese salt and the Java-salt price reduction — Van der Kemp’s reference
In P. H. van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 the island — more precisely its southern portion, Zuid-Celebes, with its principal port of Makassar — appears only as a single footnote, but in a context that connects it directly to the wider commercial rivalry which forms the background of the Acheh treaty of 1819 and the treaty of 17 March 1824.
Van der Kemp’s footnote (at p. 234, in Appendix X) explains a passage of a dispatch from the Singapore authorities complaining of Dutch commercial hostility. The Batavian Government had, on the advice of the well-known member of the Council of the Indies Van de Graaff, sharply reduced the export price of government salt from Java — from 70 to 30 rupees per coyan — so that Java salt would no longer be displaced in the Buitenbezittingen (the Outer Possessions) by Siaraeesch, Makassaarsch en Bimaneesch zout: that is, by salt produced in Siak (or rather Siak’s coastal dependencies), Makassar (Celebes) and Bima on Sumbawa. Van der Kemp refers the reader to his own Zoutwerk, pp. 153–154, for the broader picture.
The complaint, as the Singapore merchants framed it, was that this price cut was an act of “specific enmity” against Singapore. Van der Kemp drily observes that the reduction stood “in no other connection with the bitter enmity against Singapore” than that every interested party tries to bring his wares to market or draw trade towards himself; only when British interests happened to be hurt did such competition acquire, in English eyes, the name of hostility. Celebes thus enters Van der Kemp’s narrative as one of the producing regions whose cheap salt had for years supplied the East Coast of Sumatra and the rest of the Outer Possessions, frustrating the Dutch government’s monopoly hopes.
In the discussions between Raffles and the Dutch plenipotentiaries during 1824, commercial access to the East Coast of Sumatra and the right to ship Siamese salt through Singapore to Sumatra were presented as vital British interests. Celebes, as the source of Makassaarsch zout, was one of the regional producers whose competition the Java monopoly was designed to suppress; its mention by Van der Kemp helps to situate the Aceh question within the larger field of Netherlands-Indian commercial policy, of which the Acheh agreement of 1819 was only a single, if momentous, expression.
Significance
Celebes — and especially its southern portion with the port of Makassar — appears in the AcehWiki corpus as a comparative reference point within two distinct scholarly discussions of Aceh. In Snouck Hurgronje’s The Achehnese the island’s southern region serves as one of the “outlying Dutch possessions” whose shared adat with Java refutes Van den Berg’s claim that the saguna-sakaya division is a specially Javanese custom; in Van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 the same region (under the name Makassar) serves as one of the salt-producing regions whose competition the Java monopoly was designed to suppress. Both appearances are comparative: Celebes enters each discussion not for its own sake but as an example illustrating the breadth of a usage — a custom, a commercial rivalry — that the author regards as common to the wider Malay-Indonesian world. The two contexts together show how the southern Celebes region functioned in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Dutch scholarship on Aceh as a recurring comparative point of reference, linking adat-law discussion to commercial-policy discussion within the same Netherlands-Indian world.
Account in du Croo’s Generaal Swart (1943)
He held the post at 1,500 guilders a month with the title Civiel en Militair Gouverneur van Celebes en Onderhoorigheden, simultaneously Military Commander of Menado and Timor en Onderhoorigheden. Van Heutsz defended his subsequent appointment to Atjeh on that ground: “Governor Swart, who made himself highly deserving in the field of administration both in the South and East Division of Borneo and in Celebes.” Those who knew only Atjeh considered the work in Borneo and Celebes easier and not comparable; Swart denied it, holding that “it was all the application of the same insights — though under different circumstances.” He revisited Celebes with his wife in 1928.
See Also
- L. W. C. van den Berg
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- P. H. van der Kemp
- Java
- Madura
- Madiun
- Banten
- Aceh
- Netherlands India
- Siak
- Bima
- Singapore
- Sumatra’s East Coast
- Buitenbezittingen
- Stamford Raffles
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Borneo
- Malay Peninsula
- H. N. A. Swart
- General Swart, Pacifier of Atjeh (1943)
- Pacificatie van Atjeh
- Atjeh
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159–239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.
Generaal Swart, Pacificator van Atjeh (“General Swart, Pacifier of Atjeh”), by M. H. du Croo, Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with the collaboration of H. J. Schmidt, Titular Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with a foreword by His Excellency Lieutenant-General K.N.I.L. (retired) G. K. Dijkstra (Maastricht: N.V. Leiter-Nypels, 1943), Chapter VII, XIV; Extract from the service record.