The concept-convention of 24 July 1820 — referred to by P. H. Van der Kemp as the Dutch ontwerp-conventie of July 1820 — was the draft convention proposed by the Dutch plenipotentiaries Fagel and Falck in the course of the Fagel-Elout negotiations with the British plenipotentiaries Lord Castlereagh and Canning. Its first article expressly disavowed the conduct of Raffles and his subordinates and recognised Dutch rights in the archipelago; but the convention was not accepted, and the negotiations broke up without agreement. The text nevertheless survived in the diplomatic record and was revived, with consequences fatal to the Dutch case, in the negotiations of 1824.
Background
By mid-1820 the disputes between Britain and the Netherlands over the execution of the treaty of 13 August 1814 had reached a point at which both sides were willing to consider a revision. The Dutch plenipotentiaries Fagel and Falck arrived in London armed with instructions to seek, among other things, an express British recognition that the conduct of British agents in the archipelago — particularly Raffles’s incipient activities at Bencoolen and his intrigues against Dutch authority on Sumatra — had been contrary to the spirit of the 1814 settlement. The result was the draft convention of 24 July 1820.
Article 1: disavowal of Raffles
The most important article of the concept-convention was article 1, which expressly disavowed the conduct of Raffles and his subordinates, and recognised Dutch rights in the archipelago. Van der Kemp notes that the Dutch plenipotentiaries had “at that time” — i.e. in 1820 — already “desired an express treaty-disavowal of what had been done by Raffles and his subordinates” (eene uitdrukkelijke afkeuring bij tractaat van hetgeen door Raffles en zijne ondergeschikten was misdaan). This article was the direct precursor of the demand, renewed in 1824, that the British explicitly repudiate Raffles’s conduct in Sumatra and the Acheh convention of 1819.
Failure and revival
The concept-convention was rejected. The British plenipotentiaries refused to subscribe to an article that would have committed them to an express disavowal of their own subordinate’s conduct, and the negotiations broke up without agreement on the substantive points. “Everything remained in consideration”, Van der Kemp records: “those pieces had by no means the force of a treaty, intended to operate for the future.”
The concept-convention’s article 1 nevertheless survived in the diplomatic record. When the negotiations of 1824 opened, the British plenipotentiaries Canning and Wynn were able to point to the Dutch desire for an express disavowal of Raffles as evidence that the Dutch themselves had been dissatisfied with the 1814 settlement; and the demand was eventually met, not by an express article in the treaty of 17 March 1824, but by a British nota in which the British government “took note of” the disavowal. The result, Van der Kemp remarks, was that the disavowal took the form of a British declaration in which “England’s attitude” was itself the subject of the testimony — a transformation he considered a diplomatic defeat for the Netherlands.
Significance
The concept-convention of 24 July 1820 is important in Van der Kemp’s argument as the first formal Dutch attempt to obtain British recognition of Dutch rights in the archipelago and British disavowal of Raffles’s conduct. Its rejection in 1820 left the question open; its revival in 1824, in the form of the British nota annexed to the treaty of 17 March 1824, produced the awkward compromise by which the Dutch undertook to respect the independence of Acheh — a gratuitous concession that, in Van der Kemp’s view, paralysed Dutch policy on Sumatra for nearly half a century. The concept-convention thus belongs to the same train of diplomatic events as the August 1820 nota exchange and the raising of the Acheh treaty in February 1824.
See Also
- Anton Reinhard Falck
- Hendrik Fagel
- Elout
- George Canning
- Fagel-Elout negotiations (August 1820)
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1814)
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Convention of 24 January 1817
- Raising of the Acheh treaty in London negotiations
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Treaty of Pedir (1819)
- Suzerainty question
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.