Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824

Properties3
descriptionBilateral agreement of 17 March 1824 between Great Britain and the Netherlands that divided the East Indian archipelago into respective spheres of influence and inserted a fateful Acheh reservation that paralysed Dutch policy on Sumatra for nearly half a century.
tagsevent, document, political, treaty, international, colonial, anglo-dutch, diplomacy, dutch, british, acheh
aliasesthe London Treaty of 1824, Tractaat van Londen (1824), Londense tractaat van 1824, Treaty of 1824, Treaty of London 1824, Dutch-British Treaty of 1824, Tractaat van 17 Maart 1824, London treaty of 17 March 1824, Londensch tractaat van 1824, Tractaat van Londen, London Treaty, Treaty of London, Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824), Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London 1824, Treaty of London (1824), Londensche traktaat 1824, 1824 Treaty, London Convention 1824

17 min read

Note on nomenclature. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 is known in Dutch as the Tractaat van 17 Maart 1824 or Londensch tractaat van 1824 (and also simply as Tractaat van Londen). One of the source documents (De geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Korps Mariniers van 1665–1945) gives the date as 7 March 1824 — almost certainly a typographical error for 17 March; another (DLP-55) gives 27 August 1824, possibly a confusion with the ratification-instructions of 31 August 1824. The historical Treaty of London was signed on 17 March 1824 in London.

The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London of 17 March 1824 — known in Dutch as the Tractaat van 17 Maart 1824 — was the convention by which Great Britain and the Netherlands divided the East Indian archipelago into respective spheres of influence: the Malay Peninsula to Britain, Sumatra and the islands to the south to the Netherlands. Negotiated in London by the British plenipotentiaries Canning and Wynn and the Dutch plenipotentiaries Falck and Fagel (with Elout advising from The Hague), the treaty bound the Netherlands to a pair of contradictory undertakings regarding Acheh — to guarantee the security of trade and shipping there, while also promising to respect the country’s independence. Snouck Hurgronje described the treaty, with characteristic directness, as having been entered into “with great lack of foresight” by the Dutch Government, since the stipulation to respect Achehnese independence rendered impossible the fulfilment of the other undertaking — to guarantee security of trade in a country “with its fanatical and treacherous population, turbulent and warlike to a degree unknown among the other races of the Archipelago, as well as hopelessly divided against itself.” P. H. Van der Kemp traced this fateful Acheh clause to its origin: a seemingly innocuous reservation that, in his analysis, sprang directly from the Acheh convention of 1819 and paralysed Dutch policy on Sumatra for nearly half a century.

Background

The British experience of Acheh in the late eighteenth century had already shown that European influence over the country was “utterly impracticable without employing a large military force to overawe the inhabitants.” Governor R. Fullerton wrote in 1825 that “such an arrangement on our part was long considered a desirable object, but it has been found utterly impracticable without employing a large military force to overawe the inhabitants.” Francis Light and James Price had grasped earlier still that “to subdue all the chiefs” — and their name was legion — a force sufficient for that purpose would be necessary. The Dutch, as the one power already settled in Sumatra and having brought the other territories of the island under its suzerainty or control, were compelled during the second decennial period of the nineteenth century to take measures of their own to ensure the safety of foreign trade in Acheh.

The 1824 treaty revised the earlier Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1814) and the Convention of 24 January 1817, by which financial disputes between the two colonial powers had been referred to Europe. From the Dutch side the chief goal was to obtain unambiguous recognition of supremacy over Sumatra in exchange for the surrender of Dutch factories in Hindostan, of Malacca, and of all claims to Singapore. Minister Elout, in his advice of 12 February 1824, expressly urged that “a clause be inserted by which all interference of the English in Sumatra is excluded, just as that of the Netherlands in the Malaccan peninsula.” Article 9 of the draft convention accordingly provided that “no British office shall be established on that island, nor any treaty, under British authority, be concluded with any of the native Princes, Chiefs or States upon the same.”

The treaty followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the re-establishment of Dutch authority in the former Dutch East Indies. Britain, having secured its own trading interests in the region, sought a clear division of spheres of influence to avoid conflict with the Netherlands. The agreement therefore delineated zones of naval responsibility and affirmed (with respect to Acheh) the political autonomy of local polities.

The Acheh reservation

It was during the final stage of negotiations that the British plenipotentiaries unexpectedly raised the existence of the 1819 Acheh convention concluded by Raffles. They represented it as a mere engagement for hospitality to shipwrecked British subjects, and obtained permission from The Hague — conveyed verbally by Captain Elout (son of the minister) under the King’s authorisation of 13 February 1824 — to insert a clause preserving such hospitality. The Dutch plenipotentiaries, Falck and Fagel, had not themselves read the 1819 instrument.

When the text was finally laid before the conference on 23 February 1824, the Dutch discovered that the Raffles convention contained Article 6 — a clause excluding other Europeans and Americans from residence in Acheh and obliging the sultan to make no treaty without British consent. The British thereupon proposed that the 1819 convention be modified “by a simple arrangement for the hospitable reception of British ships and subjects in the port of Acheh,” and expressed the hope that the Dutch government would take measures to secure those of its provisions “favourable to the general interests of Europeans established in the Eastern seas.” In their dispatches of 21 February 1824 and 24 February 1824 the Dutch plenipotentiaries acceded — and in a counter-note went further than their instructions warranted, declaring that the Netherlands would “regulate its relations with Acheh in such a manner that this State, without losing anything of its independence, should offer to navigators and traders that permanent safety, which could not exist except through the moderate exercise of European influence.”

Van der Kemp stresses two points about this exchange. First, the reservation was in form an independent Dutch declaration guaranteeing Acheh’s independence — a gratuitous concession not required by the treaty’s basis. Second, the technical justification advanced by the British — that Article 6 of the 1819 convention conflicted with Article 3 of the new treaty, which prohibited unequal commercial duties — was incorrect: Article 6 prohibited residence, not trade, and was therefore not in conflict with Article 3; the proper article would have been Article 9, which absolutely excluded British treaties with native states on Sumatra. It is this same contradiction — guaranteeing the security of trade and shipping in Acheh while simultaneously promising to respect the country’s independence — that Snouck Hurgronje identified as the treaty’s structural flaw: an undertaking impossible to carry out in a country “hopelessly divided against itself.”

Provisions

Beyond the Acheh declaration, the treaty:

  • Ceded Dutch possessions in Hindostan and Malacca to Britain;
  • Ceded British possessions on Sumatra — including Benkoelen (Bencoolen) — to the Netherlands;
  • Recognised Dutch supremacy over Sumatra (Article 9) and British supremacy over the Malay Peninsula;
  • Regulated the Riouw–Lingga archipelago (Article 12, by which the Dutch relinquished Singapore and the British undertook to establish no office on the Karimon Islands, Batam, Bintan, or Lingga);
  • Provided for reciprocal treatment of shipping at Anjer and Tapanoeli (Articles 10–12, severely criticised by Elout in his advice of 12 February 1824);
  • Bound both powers not to sign treaties with local rulers in each other’s spheres;
  • Committed both powers to the suppression of piracy;
  • Provided for free trade in each other’s colonies;
  • Provided for a payment of £100,000 to the Netherlands for British expenses during the interim period.

The treaty’s maritime security clause also gave the Dutch the right to patrol the Strait of Malacca and the surrounding seas, while the Acheh sovereignty clause recognised the independent status of the Aceh Sultanate. The latter point later Dutch authorities found “difficult to reconcile” with their expansionist aims. The text of the treaty was published in the Dutch colonial archives and remains a key primary source for scholars of early-nineteenth-century Dutch–British relations in the East Indies.

Note on the source. One of the merged source files (the documents entry drawn from De geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Korps Mariniers van 1665–1945) states that “the Dutch ceded control of Benkoelen and Padang to the British, while the British recognised Dutch dominance over the Sultanate of Aceh.” This is incorrect: in 1824 it was Britain that ceded Benkoelen to the Netherlands (along with other Sumatran possessions), in exchange for Malacca; and the treaty did not recognise Dutch dominance over Acheh but rather reserved Achehnese independence. Padang was already Dutch. The error is preserved here only to be corrected.

Reception

The treaty was ratified with the Acheh declaration attached, and the instructions of 31 August 1824 transmitted the contradictory provisions to the Indies. Falck wrote optimistically to Van der Palm on 7 April 1824 that “the whole island of Sumatra (Java minor) is now withdrawn from British influence and placed within the sphere of Netherlands policy.” Within months this optimism was dashed. Fullerton’s Pinang Nota of 1825 immediately pointed out that, thanks to the Acheh independence declaration, the British could prevent the Dutch from passing from Article 3 to Article 2 on Sumatra’s East Coast — that is, from enforcing any duties at all.

Consequences

Van der Kemp traces how Palmerston thereafter “attached himself simply to the letter of the treaty of 1824,” opposing every Dutch extension of authority on Sumatra on the ground that no treaty clause affirmatively granted such a right. The result was a paper war that lasted until the Sumatra Treaty of 1871, in which Britain abandoned its objections to Dutch expansion on Sumatra — at the price, Van der Kemp suggests, of the cession of the Dutch Cape of Guinea. The whole Acheh question — and ultimately the Dutch intervention on Sumatra’s East Coast and the later Aceh War — may be traced back, in Van der Kemp’s argument, to the careless insertion of the Acheh reservation in 1824. He compared the manoeuvre pointedly to the Transvaal suzerainty question of 1881–1884, in which a clause inserted to satisfy British opposition was later converted into a cause of war.

Snouck Hurgronje, writing from the Achehnese end of the same history, drew the same conclusion by a different route: no wonder, he observes, that in the following half-century the complaints of wrongs of every sort suffered at the hands of the Achehnese by European and American traders became more and more plentiful — complaints that ultimately led, in 1871, to the new treaty with England under which Holland was left with more freedom of action in the control of Acheh. People flattered themselves “quite seriously with the hope that a treaty with the Sultan of Acheh — forced out of him, if need be, by menaces and by the despatch of a small force — would succeed in doing all that was wanted; they did not trouble their minds in the least degree with the internal condition of the country.” Even after the war had actually begun in 1873, they continued to entertain the vain hope that a treaty of this sort might be the basis of a solution of their Achehnese difficulties.

The treaty’s dual obligations — to police the waters around Sumatra while respecting Achehnese sovereignty — created a diplomatic paradox that Dutch officials later cited to justify military intervention when they deemed Acheh’s zeerovers (“pirates”) a threat to regional stability. The paradox was dispelled only after the abolition of the royal authority and the death of the last Sultan, when the Netherlands Indies Government came forward as his successor and claimed the allegiance of the chiefs of the dependent kingdoms. Many chiefs of Achehnese coast-dependencies formally gave in their submission in order to protect their commerce from injury, “but the number who withheld their allegiance was greater; and many chiefs in the interior did not consider themselves bound by the promises of the raja of the coast.” Furthermore, the state of war added to the many chiefs who already disputed authority in Acheh “a countless number of others: adventurers, religious leaders, military chiefs of every type.” For years the Dutch authorities remained under the illusion that by taking up certain strong positions — one having the former Sultan’s residence as its centre and others being important harbours in the dependencies — the rest of the country could be forced to submit. This was the illusion that produced, after the governorship of General van der Heyden (1877–1881), the civil government period and the concentration scheme, and that was finally dispelled only under Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz from 1898.

In Dispereert Niet (Deel XI, 1946) the treaty is summarised as a Dutch agreement to “regulate its relations with Atjeh in such a way that this state, without losing its independence, would be brought to guarantee the safety of the white sailors and merchants, which could hardly be achieved, without a moderate European influence being exercised.” The quotation crystallises the treaty’s structural flaw: the Netherlands “had the task of police agent, but promised simultaneously not to arrest the thief, but to let him roam around in complete freedom.”

A doctor’s summary of the treaty’s legacy

Dr. Johan Wøller, recalling the background to the Aceh War he witnessed around 1905, gave a plain-spoken summary of this treaty’s effect on Dutch policy toward Atjeh: the Dutch “were until then bound by an old treaty (1824) with England, in which they obligated themselves to regulate their affairs with Atjeh in such a way, that this state without losing its independence would be brought to guarantee the safety of the white sailors and merchants, which could hardly be achieved, without a moderate European influence being exercised.” He calls it “a very weakly formulated treaty, of which Atjeh moreover never got to know anything,” and credits its restrictive character to Raffles’s determination “to prevent that the Netherlands would control both sides of Singapore Strait Malacca.” Only once Dutch hands were freed in the early 1870s were the expeditions of 1873 launched.

Significance

The Treaty of London (1824) established the colonial framework for the Malay archipelago and shaped relations between British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Its provisions on Acheh, however, created a fifty-year period of instability that ultimately led to the Aceh War of 1873–1904. The treaty’s provisions on Aceh were amended in 1871 to allow the Netherlands a free hand in Aceh — clearing the way for the war that would last, with interruptions, until 1903. Van der Kemp notes that the very fact that a separate treaty was required in 1871 to undo what had been done in 1824 is itself testimony to the magnitude of the original mistake: a treaty intended to define the spheres of the two powers had, by the casual insertion of an Acheh reservation, created an ambiguity that could only be resolved by another treaty half a century later.

Account from Schets eener parlementaire geschiedenis (1955)

The following account is drawn from the parliamentary history of the Dutch Second Chamber as narrated by Vermeulen in the colonial section of the 1955 fourth revised edition of Rengers’s *Schets*.

The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 — the London Treaty of 1824 — was the treaty between the Netherlands and England that, after the Napoleonic interlude, settled the colonial spheres of the two maritime powers. With respect to Atjeh it was agreed that the Netherlands would respect Atjehnese independence while simultaneously suppressing piracy and ensuring the safety of commerce and shipping in the surrounding waters. The two commitments — independence and suppression — proved, in the retrospective of Nederlanders over de Zeeën, “twee eisen, die moeilijk met elkaar in overeenstemming te brengen waren” (two demands difficult to reconcile with each other).

The Atjeh clause

The source records: “Ten aanzien van Atjeh werd overeengekomen, dat wij zijn onafhankelijkheid moesten erbiedigen, doch tegelijkertijd de zeeroof zouden beteugelen en zorgen voor de veiligheid van de handel; twee eisen, die moeilijk met elkaar in overeenstemming te brengen waren” (With respect to Atjeh it was agreed that we must respect its independence, but at the same time suppress piracy and ensure the safety of commerce; two demands difficult to reconcile with each other). The impossible double commitment is, in the source’s narrative, the diplomatic seed of the Atjehoorlog of 1873-1904.

The colonial-historical lesson

The source draws from the 1824 undertaking a general colonial-historical lesson: “Hier bleek namelijk voor de zoveelste maal in de koloniale geschiedenis, dat twee rijken niet onafhankelijk naast elkaar kunnen blijven bestaan, tenzij in beide een ongeveer gelijke standaard van beschaving en rechtzekerheid wordt gehandhaafd” (Here it became clear, for the umpteenth time in colonial history, that two realms cannot continue to exist independently side by side, unless in both an approximately equal standard of civilisation and legal certainty is maintained). The lesson is the source’s principal generalisation from the Atjeh case.

The 1857 contract

The 1824 undertaking was given operational form in 1857 when, after the dispatch of a warship, a contract was concluded with the Sultan of Atjeh stipulating mutual admission of trade and the suppression of sea-, strand- and people-robbing. The contract was “niet nageleefd” (not honoured).

The 1871 supersession

The 1824 undertaking was finally superseded in 1871 by the Sumatra-tractaat — the Anglo-Dutch treaty by which the Netherlands ceded its possessions on the coast of Guinea to Britain in exchange for a free Dutch hand on Sumatra.

Significance

The 1824 London Treaty is the diplomatic instrument by which the Netherlands simultaneously guaranteed Atjehnese independence and undertook to suppress Atjehnese piracy. The impossible double commitment is, in the source’s narrative, the diplomatic seed of the Atjehoorlog that began forty-nine years later.

See Also

Sources

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.

“Dispereert Niet: Twintig Eeuwen Historie van de Nederlanden”, Deel XI, by A. Algra and H. Algra (Franeker: T. Wever, 1946).

Als officier van gezondheid naar Nederlandsch-Indië, by Dr. Johan Wøller, trans. Greta Baars-Jelgersma (Utrecht: Erven J. Bijleveld), p. 144.

De geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Korps Mariniers van 1665–1945, OCR text, pp. 109–110, 121.

Nederlanders over de Zeeën: 350 Jaar geschiedenis van Nederland buitengaats, onder redactie van Dr. H. J. de Graaf, met medewerking van Prof. G. Gonggrijp, W. R. Menkman en Prof. Jhr Dr P. J. van Winter, 2e geheel herziene druk (Utrecht: W. de Haan N.V., MCMLV), pp. 197, 216. Over de eerste expeditie tegen Atjeh: Een antwoord aan Generaal de Stuers, G. G. Booms, ‘s-Gravenhage: A. van Hoogstraten & Zoon, 1875, pp. 6-7; Atjeh gedurende de tweede expeditie en later, Een Oud Officier, Batavia: Ogilvie & Co., 1876, pp. 5-11.

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