The dispatch of the Penang government secretary R. Ibbetson to Calcutta of 25 February 1824 was a formal proposal, submitted in the name of the Penang government to the Supreme Government of Bengal, that Britain intervene with military force in Acheh to establish order and confirm the authority of the sultan’s party. It is printed as Appendix 8 in Van der Kemp’s study and is one of the key documents illustrating British thinking on the eve of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London.
The immediate context was the deepening disorder in Acheh following the letter of the three Sagis of 4 December 1822 refusing to acknowledge Sultan Jauhar Alum, the sultan’s growing isolation at Pedir, and the approaching end of his life. The Penang government had already, by a letter of 11 November 1820, urged the adoption of military measures for Acheh; Coombs’ earlier mission and the commission of 1819 had both shown that purely diplomatic expedients were unavailing. The death of Governor Bannerman on 8 August 1819 had removed one obstacle to a more forward policy, and his successors — Phillips, Fullerton, and the councillors Clubley and Ibbetson — were of one mind that “decisive and even coercive measures” were now required.
Ibbetson’s dispatch observed that the policy of sending a resident or troops to enforce the 1819 treaty had been set aside in deference to the commissioners, but that affairs had now “arrived at that crisis when decisive and even coercive measures alone can prove beneficial”. Pecuniary assistance and military stores to a great amount had been afforded in 1819 with a view to securing the legitimate house of Acheh in its sovereignty, but temporising measures were now seen to be unavailing. The Penang Council therefore proposed that “the present state of Acheen is misrule and instability in its authorities”, and that, if Britain was disposed to recur to the measures of positive interference contemplated in 1819, “the occasion now offers to the British for establishing the legitimate heir, and for giving a tone and efficiency to the Government of this fine country”.
Crucially, the dispatch also raised the spectre of Dutch intervention. “It is almost unnecessary to observe”, wrote Ibbetson to George Swinton, the secretary to the Government of Bengal, “in a political view how prejudicial to the British interests might be the alliance of the Dutch with the Achinese, and that any such offer would possibly be accepted with avidity by the ejected party”. The Penang government submitted “the whole subject to the wisdom and decision of the Supreme Government”, proposing that the moment had arrived when Britain’s relations with Acheh should “be distinctly determined”.
The Bengal government did not act on the proposal, and it did not need to, for the diplomacy being conducted in London between Fagel and Falck on one side and Williams Wynn and Canning on the other was already moving towards a comprehensive Anglo-Dutch settlement. The Treaty of 17 March 1824, signed barely three weeks after Ibbetson’s dispatch, ceded Sumatra to the Netherlands and expressly abandoned the 1819 Acheh treaty in favour of a mere commercial arrangement. Britain thus secured, as Van der Kemp acidly observed, that the Netherlands should bear the cost and responsibility of policing the Achehnese waters, while England retained her commerce and her new settlement of Singapore. Ibbetson’s proposal for unilateral military intervention was thereby superseded, and the document remains chiefly as evidence of how close the British came, on the very eve of the London treaty, to a forward Acheh policy of their own.
See Also
- R. Ibbetson
- George Swinton
- W. E. Phillips
- Robert Fullerton
- W. A. Clubley
- Sultan Jauhar Alum
- Three Sagis
- Three Sagis’ letter to Penang (4 December 1822)
- Death of Sultan Jauhar Alum
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Raffles-Coombs Acheh Commission (1819)
- Treaty of Pedir (1819)
- Fullerton’s minute on Acheh (21 March 1825)
- Penang
- Calcutta
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.