Self-government and profit-province (Dutch zelfbestuur and wingewest) were the two opposed notions through which author Joh. Langhout framed the whole of his Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh (1923): Atjeh before 1873 had known three and a half centuries of “zelfbestuur” — an order, in his reading, of internal feuds, exploitative sjahbandars and sultans, sea-robbery and failed centralization — while Atjeh after 1873 had become a “wingewest” of the Netherlands, a province to be developed at the cost of many sacrifices until the Dutch “mission sacrée de civilisation” should be fulfilled.
The Stokvis formula inverted
Langhout borrowed the formula from his colleague J. E. Stokvis, the able Dutch journalist and old chief-editor of De Locomotief, whose book “Van Wingewest tot Zelfbestuur” (“From Profit-province to Self-government”) had recently offered a much-contested view of the then-current political condition of the Netherlands Indies in connection with the newest proposals for administrative revision. The title chosen by colleague Stokvis — “maar dàn in omgekeerde richting” (“but then in the inverse direction”) — Langhout wished to take over for his first chapter, which treats of “the Atjeh of former days” up to the moment that the Vice-President of the then Council of India, the heer Nieuwenhuizen, handed the ultimatum of the Indian Government to the then reigning Sultan of Atjeh: a period during which Atjeh, “de heer Stokvis zal het dadelijk met mij eens zijn! — is gekomen ‘Van Zelfbestuur tot Wingewest’”. If the conclusions of Stokvis differ from Langhout’s, he adds, this is to be blamed only on “de historie” (“history”).
”Atjeh under self-government”
One needs some courage, Langhout writes, to speak of an Atjeh before 1873 as of an Atjeh with self-government: the history runs from the freeing from the Portuguese and the assumption of the sultanate’s supremacy (1524) through the great expansion to Nias and Malakka and the ensuing “rapidly spreading demoralization”, the violence of the De Houtman era and the factories of 1601–1627, the sjahbandar regime and the murder and blockade of 1651, to “more than a century and a half” of internal feuds, sea-robbery and plundering, and the incidents of 1831–1852 that precede the treaty of 1857 and the slide to war. Attempts at centralization of authority — the edicts mentioned by K. F. H. van Langen in his “Het Atjehsche bestuur onder het Sultanaat” and those found by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje — “have never been able to bring about the least change”; a “golden century” in the sense of a period in which some state regulation benefited land and people “Atjeh has never known”. Order and rest, the two most necessary qualities for the existence of a land and a people, were lacking even under the greatest sultans; “this alles explains the fact that, though state rules were ever written down, they never were valid as a living law for land and people”. That was: “before 1873. That was: ‘Atjeh onder zelfbestuur!’"
"Atjeh as wingewest”
“Atjeh is ‘Wingewest’ geworden! En het blééf dit… Totdat Nederland zijn ‘mission sacrée de civilisation’ in haar uiterste consequenties zal hebben vervuld” — Atjeh had become a profit-province and would remain it until the Netherlands had fulfilled her sacred mission of civilization in its utmost consequences; “tot zoolang moet Atjeh maar liever ‘wingewest’ blijven en niet meer, althans niet eerder, de gevolgen van het ‘zelfbestuur’ ondervinden” — for so long Atjeh should rather remain profit-province and not again experience the consequences of the “self-government”: a relapse into the chaos of old, “the house divided against itself”, the population perishing of diseases and epidemics for want of every measure of development. The book’s sardonic ending asks: “Atjeh onder Zelfbestuur? Of: Atjeh als Wingewest? De keuze is daarginds al gedaan! Wat zullen wij, hier in Holland, dan anders beslissen?” — “The choice is already made yonder! What shall we, here in Holland, decide otherwise?”
Significance
The paired formula was characteristic of the apologetic genre to which the commemorative volume of 1923 belonged: H. N. A. Swart in his foreword distanced himself expressly from some of the author’s descriptions, while the author’s own closing word admitted the book could be seen as “reclame” for a land and a people “which so fully deserve our interest” — the interest being the precondition for the “very much money” that Governor Van Sluys declared the further pacification would still require.
See Also
- Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh
- Joh. Langhout
- Pacification of Atjeh
- Achehnese expulsion of the Portuguese from Pasè (1524)
- Edicts of the Atjehnese sultans
Source
Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh , by Joh. Langhout (The Hague: N.V. Boekhandel v/h W. P. van Stockum & Zoon, 1923), pp. 7–24, 25–26, 130.