The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London of 13 August 1814 — referred to in Dutch as the Tractaat van 13 Augustus 1814 — was the colonial treaty between Great Britain and the Sovereign Principality (later Kingdom) of the Netherlands by which Britain restored to the Netherlands the colonial possessions seized during the Napoleonic wars. The treaty was the predecessor to the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 17 March 1824, and the tensions generated by its imperfect execution supplied much of the impetus for the later revision in which the Acheh question would play so fatal a part.
Background
During the French occupation of the Netherlands (1795–1813) the Dutch colonies had been largely absorbed into the British imperial system. With the restoration of the House of Orange and the proclamation of the Sovereign Principality in 1813, the recovery of these overseas possessions became a primary Dutch objective. Negotiations in London during 1814 — to which the Dutch side contributed Falck and Fagel — resulted in the convention of 13 August 1814, by which Britain undertook to restore the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, the West Indies, and elsewhere, save for those (notably the Cape and parts of South America and the Malay Peninsula) which had been ceded before the war or were retained by mutual agreement.
Van der Kemp notes that even in 1814 Falck and Fagel were agreed that the Dutch factories in Hindostan were of little value, an assessment that would form the seed of the later idea of exchanging them for an unambiguous Dutch sphere on Sumatra.
Execution and Disputes
The execution of the treaty proved highly contentious. Raffles from Bencoolen intrigued against Dutch authority on Sumatra and in the wider archipelago, and British Indian officials at Calcutta openly suggested to their Dutch counterparts that the Dutch should surrender the Hindostan factories in exchange for compensation in the archipelago. These frictions came to a head with Raffles’s seizure of Singapore in 1819 and his Acheh convention of the same year, both of which the Dutch regarded as breaches of the 1814 settlement. The Java War period and the Padri disturbances on Sumatra’s East Coast were also linked to the unsettled state of the colonial frontier.
Van der Kemp records the British reply to Dutch protests — that the acts complained of were the work of subordinate agents and not sanctioned by London — as characteristically English: condemnation in principle combined with retention in fact of the advantages so obtained. The despatch of Lord Minto’s expedition to Java in 1811 and the subsequent British interregnum had also left numerous financial and territorial questions unresolved.
Legacy
The unresolved financial and commercial disputes between the two powers were referred, by the Convention of 24 January 1817, to the decision of the European governments. The 1814 treaty and its unresolved legacy formed the immediate background to the negotiations of 1824, in which — under the pressure of Raffles’s encroachments and the 1819 Acheh convention — the Dutch plenipotentiaries at last consented to surrender Malacca, the Hindostan factories, and all claim to Singapore in return for a British withdrawal from Sumatra. The result was the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 17 March 1824 — a settlement whose Acheh clause, in Van der Kemp’s argument, undid much of what the 1814 treaty had been intended to secure.
See Also
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Convention of 24 January 1817
- Treaty of Pedir (1819)
- Anton Reinhard Falck
- Hendrik Fagel
- Elout
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Bencoolen
- Sumatra
- Java
- Singapore
- Hindostan
- Lord Minto
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.