The sphere of influence — in Dutch invloedssfeer — is the central organising principle by which the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London of 17 March 1824 purported to settle the long rivalry between the two powers in the East Indian archipelago. As P. H. van der Kemp presented the concept in his 1900 study of the Acheh treaty of 1819, the 1824 instrument was supposed to mark off the geographical areas within which each party would henceforth enjoy “its own free sphere of activity” (vrije sfeer van werkzaamheid): England to the west and north, the Netherlands to the east and south, with Sumatra reserved, in the Dutch view, as exclusively Dutch and the Malay Peninsula exclusively British.
The principle as stated in 1824
The grundgedanke of the treaty, in Van der Kemp’s account, was “the demarcation of the terrains where each party would have its own free sphere of activity”. The Netherlands was to surrender its factories in Hindostan, Malacca and the new settlement of Singapore; in exchange, by Article IX, England promised that “no British office shall be established on the island of Sumatra, nor any treaty under British authority concluded with any of the native princes, chiefs or states thereon”. The Dutch, in turn, undertook a corresponding withdrawal from the Malay Peninsula. Minister Elout, in his advisory minute of 12 February 1824, had explicitly insisted on the necessity of “a provision by which all English interference in Sumatra would be excluded, as the Dutch interference with the Malaccan peninsula”.
The betrayal of the principle
Van der Kemp’s indictment of the Dutch plenipotentiaries — Fagel and Falck — turns on the contention that they failed to uphold this principle at the decisive moment. Although the convention’s whole basis was the demarcation of separate spheres, the British at the eleventh hour introduced the Acheh reservation, by which the Acheh treaty of 1819 was to be revised only in form, while the independence of Acheh was to be perpetually guaranteed by the Netherlands. The Dutch negotiators, who “had not even read” the 1819 instrument they were discussing, swallowed the reservation as a polite formality. As Van der Kemp observed, the “free sphere of activity” promised to the Netherlands on Sumatra thus turned out to be hedged with a British-defined reservation that materially compromised it. “Was that now a manner to fulfil the sole goal of the treaty”, he asked, “the grant to each of his own well-delimited sphere of influence?”
From principle to perpetual friction
The dilution of the sphere-of-influence principle at Acheh had practical consequences lasting fifty years. Once Article III of the 1824 treaty had been qualified by the Acheh reservation, every Dutch attempt to extend authority on Sumatra’s East Coast or in northern Sumatra could be, and was, met by British protests invoking “the letter of the treaty of 1824” — the phrase Van der Kemp took from E. de Waal. When Palmerston protested against Dutch tariff policies and territorial expansion, he relied on precisely the same argument: that the convention had reserved Achehnese independence, and that any Dutch move in that direction was a breach of the 1824 settlement. The Pinang Nota of 1825 of Governor Fullerton was the first systematic exposition of this restrictive reading.
A wider analytical category
Beyond the specific case, Van der Kemp employed the concept of the sphere of influence as a general analytical tool. The Pinang Nota of 1825, the circular to nine Siak chiefs, and the letter to the Sultan of Siak of 7 February 1828 all become, in his reading, instruments by which the British Indian government at Pinang sought to prevent the Dutch sphere on Sumatra from ever becoming effective. Only the Sumatra Treaty of 1871 finally cleared the matter, with England abandoning “all remonstrances against the extension of Dutch authority in any part of the island of Sumatra” — though at the price, in Van der Kemp’s view, of the cession of the Cape of Guinea and the Dutch West African possessions.
Conceptual significance
The sphere of influence as exemplified by the 1824 settlement is, in Van der Kemp’s argument, a doctrine whose efficacy depends entirely on the good faith of the parties. Where one party retains, in the form of an “innocuous” reservation, an instrument for perpetual interference in the other’s allotted sphere, the doctrine degenerates into a programme of constraint disguised as a settlement. The Acheh controversy thus becomes a case-study in the politics of spheres of influence — a term which, in the diplomatic vocabulary of the late nineteenth century, was rapidly acquiring the ominous connotations that would mark the Transvaal and the suzerainty question.
See Also
- Acheh treaty of 1819
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Suzerainty question
- Pinang Nota (1825)
- Dead letter
- Elout’s advice of 12 February 1824
- First draft of 1824 Anglo-Dutch treaty
- Concept-convention of 24 July 1820
- Fagel-Elout negotiations (August 1820)
- Sumatra Treaty of 1871
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.