Dutch Salt Price Reduction

Properties2
tagsconcept, colonial-policy, economic-policy, diplomatic-concept
aliasesJava salt price reduction, salt price reduction of 1827, Java-zout verlaging, reduction of the price of Java salt

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The Dutch Salt Price Reduction — the considerable lowering of the export price of government salt from Java, destined for the Outer Possessions — was an early Netherlands-Indian commercial measure that, although wholly economic in design, came to be represented by British observers at Singapore as a hostile act directed against the trade of the new free port. P. H. van der Kemp discussed the reduction in appendix material of his 1900 study of the Treaty of Pedir (1819), partly in order to expose the readiness with which ordinary commercial competition was recast, in British rhetoric, as “specific enmity” against England.

The measure and its authorship

The reduction was carried out, as Van der Kemp records in a footnote to the 1900 study, “above all on the advice of the well-known member of the Council of the Indies, Van de Graaff”. The export price of Java salt was lowered from 70 rupees to 30 rupees per coyan. The object, Van der Kemp stresses, was purely economic: Java salt was henceforth no longer to be driven from the Outer Possessions by Siamese, Makassarese and Bimanese salt. The measure, in other words, formed part of a general commercial policy intended to integrate the salt market of the archipelago around the Javanese government monopoly.

The British reaction

The reduction was reported to Pinang in a letter of John Prince, formerly resident of Singapore, dated Batavia 29 November 1827, in which he described the contemplated dispatch of the frigate Bellona to the East Coast of Sumatra by Commissioner-General Du Bus. The Bellona mission, as Prince understood it, was intended to induce the chiefs of the East Coast — Siak, Kampar, Jambi and so on — to discontinue their purchase of salt from Singapore and to take it instead from Riouw, where it would be delivered at as low a rate as could be obtained at the former place. In Prince’s account, the lowering of the salt price from 70 to 30 rupees per coyan was the “prefatory step” to the destruction of Singapore, the first instalment of a programme by which the Netherlands Government at Batavia, “truly inimical” to Singapore because of the injury it had caused to their colonial commerce, would stop at no exertion or pains for its destruction.

Van der Kemp’s analysis

Van der Kemp’s commentary is pointed. The significant reduction of the price of government salt on Java, intended for export, stood, he insists, in no other connection with “fierce enmity against Singapore” than this: that every interested party naturally seeks to bring his wares to market and to draw trade toward himself. When such competition happens to disadvantage English interests, however, it is at once christened “specific enmity”. The argument was, in Van der Kemp’s view, characteristic of the genre: ordinary commercial competition was redescribed as political hostility, and was then folded into the broader programme of British remonstrance against Dutch commercial policy in the archipelago. The salt-price episode thus takes its place alongside the protests against Dutch differential duties and against Dutch expansion on the East Coast as one of the recurrent occasions at which the restrictive reading of the Treaty of London of 1824 was pressed into service.

The Bellona mission and after

The salt price reduction was the commercial complement of the Bellona mission of 1827-1828. The latter, by appearing with a Dutch commission of war in the ports of the East Coast, was expected to make an impression on the natives of Siak, Kampar and Jambi favourable to Dutch and unfavourable to British commercial interests. It was precisely this combination of commercial and political pressure that Governor Fullerton identified, in his minute of 16 March 1828, as the danger against which Britain was bound to provide a counterpoise. His response was the circular letter of 21 May 1828 to the nine Siak chiefs, by which the chiefs were apprised of the privileges guaranteed to them under the 1824 treaty and invited to consider themselves under no obligation to comply with Dutch requisitions.

Conceptual significance

The salt price reduction thus illustrates, in Van der Kemp’s analytical framework, the intimate interpenetration of commercial and diplomatic contention in the Anglo-Dutch relationship. What was, on the Dutch side, an internal measure of colonial economic policy was, on the British side, immediately translated into a diplomatic incident and absorbed into the running controversy over the interpretation of the sphere-of-influence clauses of the 1824 treaty. The episode is one of the clearest examples in the 1900 study of Van der Kemp’s broader thesis: that the persistent British reading of Dutch policy as “specific enmity” was less an accurate description of Dutch intentions than a rhetorical instrument by which commercial competition could be converted into a grievance, and a grievance into a diplomatic case.

See Also

Source

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.

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