The paper war — in Dutch papieroorlog or pennenkrijg — is the sardonic phrase employed in P. H. van der Kemp’s 1900 study to describe the protracted exchanges of formal correspondence by which Anglo-Dutch disputes in the East Indian archipelago were simultaneously fought out and obscured. The term was not the historian’s coinage: it was used by Raffles himself, and Van der Kemp draws explicit attention to the fact that Raffles reserved the term for at least two of his own controversies — first the dispute with Coombs during the Acheh commission of 1819, and later the Singapore controversy that became notorious in metropolitan circles.
Raffles and Coombs at Acheh
The first paper war took place on board the commission’s vessel at the roadstead of Acheh during the seven-week sojourn of 1819. Raffles held that Sultan Jauhar (Djohor) Alum enjoyed the prior claim to the throne; Coombs maintained, with equal force, that the commission ought rather to deal with Sultan Syf, who was recognised by the Three Sagis. In a letter to his friend Sir Robert Harry Inglis, dated Singapore 12 June 1819, Raffles described the dispute as a “paper war, which actually occupies above a thousand pages of the Company’s largest sized paper”, before concluding that Coombs “came round to my opinion”. As Van der Kemp drily observed: “One sees it — he did not use the word only for the Singapore pen-war!” The incident illustrates the formal, written, almost ritual character that disputes between British officials assumed: even colleagues sailing on the same ship expressed their disagreements through lengthy memorials in the Company’s largest format.
The Lucas–Pinang paper war
Van der Kemp employs the same term a second time, with characteristic irony, to characterise the correspondence that arose between Colonel Lucas at Malacca and the government of Prince of Wales’ Island over the Wilhelmina affair. After the mutiny of the Dutch brig Wilhelmina and the murder of Lieutenant Bouwens in 1818, Saif ul-Alum (Syf), then sovereign at Telok Semawé, had captured part of the plundered treasure. When the Dutch authorities at Batavia demanded restitution and the surrender of named culprits, Governor Timmerman Thyssen of Malacca addressed a letter of 20 January 1821 to Governor Phillips at Pinang; Phillips passed the papers to Lucas for examination; Lucas in turn requested a new examination of Syf, which the Pinang secretariat, under W. A. Clubley, declined. “And so, with the return of the Dutch ship with nothing accomplished, this Papieroorlog also seems to have ended”, Van der Kemp summarises — though he notes that the obligation Pinang had thereby incurred toward the Syf family would endure.
Conceptual significance
The paper war is more than a picturesque phrase. Van der Kemp treats it as a structural feature of Anglo-Dutch colonial relations: each controversy was conducted in writing, with formal memorials, polite but inflexible replies, and a quasi-judicial decorum that obscured the underlying balance of force. The Pinang government, by deferring to “sovereign authority” exercised by Syf at the relevant time, could decline Dutch demands while protesting eternal friendship; Lucas, by accepting the Pinang secretariat’s explanations, could return empty-handed without conceding the Dutch claim. The form was impeccable; the substance was an indefinite prolongation of the status quo.
A recurring pattern
This pattern, in Van der Kemp’s larger argument, recurs in the metropolitan negotiations as well: the Fagel-Elout negotiations of August 1820, the concept-convention of 24 July 1820, the Dutch plenipotentiaries’ dispatches of 21 and 24 February 1824, and the various notes exchanged at the conclusion of the Treaty of London of 1824 are all, in a sense, episodes of the same paper war — vast accumulations of written matter that substituted for resolution. The Pinang Nota of 1825, the Fullerton circular to the Siak chiefs, and the letter to the Sultan of Siak of 1828 extend the same genre into the next decade.
See Also
- Acheh treaty of 1819
- Raffles-Coombs Acheh Commission (1819)
- Wilhelmina mutiny and murder of Bouwens
- Lucas mission to Telok Semawé (February 1821)
- Pinang Nota (1825)
- Dead letter
- Captain Coombs
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Colonel E. Lucas
- W. E. Phillips
- W. A. Clubley
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.