De Padrie-oorlog (Costa, 1939)

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tagsdocument, article, colonial, military, religious, padri, sumatra, westkust, 1939, officersvereeniging
aliasesCosta 1939, De Padrie-oorlog, De Padrie-oorlog haar oorsprong strijd en verloop ter Sumatra's Westkust, S. da Costa Padri War, Padri War da Costa, Padrie war Sumatra's Westkust

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De Padrie-oorlog; haar oorsprong, strijd en verloop ter Sumatra’s Westkust — “The Padri War; its origin, struggle, and course on Sumatra’s West Coast” — is an article by S. da Costa, published in 1939 in the Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging (Organ of the Netherlands Indies Officers’ Association), No. 24, p. 149 e.v., and reprinted in Ons Aller Belang (Our Common Interest), No. 33, p. 318 e.v., in which the author surveyed the Padri War — its origin (oorsprong), struggle (strijd), and course (verloop) — as fought on Sumatra’s Westkust. The article is recorded as No. 558 in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940), in the Sumatra chapter.

Subject

The article’s subject, as recorded by Van Meurs, is the Padrie-oorlog — the Padri War — treated in three aspects: its oorsprong (origin), strijd (struggle), and verloop (course, development) on Sumatra’s Westkust. The Padri War was the early-nineteenth-century religious and military conflict in the Minangkabau highlands of central Sumatra, in which the Padries — Islamic reformers influenced by Wahhabi teaching and returning from the pilgrimage to Mecca — sought to impose a stricter Islam on the Minangkabau, and in doing so came into conflict both with the traditional adat authorities and, eventually, with the Dutch colonial state. The war’s theatre extended across the Minangkabau lands and, in its later phases, onto the west coast of Sumatra. The standard Dutch term Padrie is the colonial spelling of Padri; the corpus’s canonical entry on the war is under Padri War on Sumatra’s East Coast.

The restriction of da Costa’s survey to “Sumatra’s Westkust” — the west coast — is significant: it indicates that the article treated the war not as a whole but as it played out on the western seaboard, where the colonial engagement with the Padries intersected with the longer history of Dutch involvement in the west-coast ports and with the geopolitics of the Atjehnese sphere of influence on the same coast.

Author and venue

Da Costa published the article in the Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging, the principal professional journal of the Netherlands Indies officer corps — the same venue that carried the Bannink article on the Atjeh-oorlog (No. 550) in the same year and volume. The article was reprinted in Ons Aller Belang, a periodical of broader colonial interest, indicating that its readership was expected to extend beyond the officer corps. The double publication — in the officers’ journal and in the general colonial periodical — marks the article as one judged to be of interest to both military and civilian colonial readerships.

Place in the 1939 Literatuur-Overzicht

The article is No. 558 in the Sumatra chapter (Hoofdstuk III, Nos. 548–658) of Van Meurs’s survey, where it stands as the sole C-letter entry of the Sumatra chapter, between the B-letter entries (Nos. 550–557) and the D-letter entries (Nos. 559–564). Its placement there, alongside the Bannink article on the Atjeh-oorlog and the Damsté edition of the Seven Sleepers legend (No. 560), marks it as one of the retrospective military-historical accounts of the Sumatran wars published in 1939.

Significance

For AcehWiki, the article is significant as a 1939 retrospective on the Padri War — the religious-reform conflict in the Minangkabau highlands that shaped the early-nineteenth-century geopolitics of central Sumatra and that intersected, on the west coast, with the Atjehnese sphere of influence. The article furnishes an independent source for the west-coast dimension of the Padri War, and it complements the corpus’s existing entry on the Padri War, which treats the war from the perspective of the east-coast theatre. The west-coast framing is the article’s distinctive contribution, and it connects the Padri War to the longer history of the Westkust of Sumatra and of the Atjehnese presence on that coast.

See Also

Source

Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 558. Citing: S. da Costa, “De Padrie-oorlog; haar oorsprong, strijd en verloop ter Sumatra’s Westkust,” Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging, No. 24 (1939), p. 149 e.v.; ook in Ons Aller Belang, No. 33 (1939), p. 318 e.v.

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