The Jameson’s raid comparison is the sustained parallel drawn by Van der Kemp between the Jameson raid against the Transvaal of December 1895–January 1896 and the Raffles’ raid on Palembang of 1819. The comparison is introduced in the closing section of the 1900 article, where Van der Kemp sums up the lessons to be drawn from the half-century of Anglo-Dutch dispute over Acheh and Sumatra.
The Comparison
Van der Kemp writes: “Op de overeenstemming van Jameson’s raid met den door Raffles’ bevolen tocht naar Palembang in 1819 had ik de gelegenheid reeds te wijzen” — “On the agreement of Jameson’s raid with the expedition to Palembang ordered by Raffles in 1819 I have already had occasion to remark.” The reference is to Van der Kemp’s earlier study, “De geschiedenis van een Engelschen raid op Hollandsch grondgebied” (“The history of an English raid on Dutch territory”), published in De Gids of February 1898.
The two episodes, in Van der Kemp’s reading, exhibit the same diplomatic pattern. In each case a British agent, acting either without authority or in excess of it, took armed action against the territory of a state with which his government was in treaty relations — the South African Republic in the one case, the sultanate of Palembang claimed by the Netherlands in the other. In each case the action was disavowed by the home government but the fruits of it, in whole or in part, were retained. In each case the aggrieved party was left to seek redress through negotiations in which British public opinion and parliamentary opposition were invoked as reasons why no full restitution could be made. The behaviour of the British government towards its agents — “the reproaches which England constantly gave to its agents, without punishing them properly or seeing them punished, while it properly pocketed the advantages obtained by them” — was, Van der Kemp observes, by no means confined to the colonial history of the Netherlands.
The Larger Parallel
The Jameson comparison is part of a larger parallel that Van der Kemp draws between the suzerainty question of the Transvaal and the Article 6 controversy of the Treaty of 1824. In both cases, Van der Kemp argues, a clause inserted into a treaty for the satisfaction of domestic opposition — and represented at the time as of no importance — was afterwards converted into a substantive restriction on the weaker party. The Transvaal suzerainty article of the Pretoria Convention of 1881 was, in Faure’s testimony (see Faure’s letter on Transvaal suzerainty), reduced in the London Convention of 1884 to Article 4, on the explicit understanding that the suzerainty was abolished; yet the British opposition and (later) the British government continued to maintain that the suzerainty survived. The Acheh reservation of 1824 was, in like manner, presented to the Dutch plenipotentiaries as a matter of no importance; yet it was afterwards treated as the standing proof that Dutch supremacy over the whole of Sumatra had not been recognised.
The parallel extends also to the absence of formal minutes. In the Treaty of 1824 no minutes were kept of the oral communications between the Dutch plenipotentiaries and Captain Elout, or between the British and Dutch plenipotentiaries over Acheh; in the conferences of 1884 no minutes were kept of the discussions between the British government and the Transvaal deputation. In both cases, Van der Kemp notes, the historical record was left to be reconstructed from the recollections of survivors. The conclusion he draws is that the diplomatic methods which had produced the South African crisis of 1895–1899 were the same methods which, seventy-five years earlier, had produced the Acheh reservation of 1824 and the Acheh War of 1873.
See Also
- Raffles’ raid on Palembang (1819)
- London Convention on Transvaal
- Faure’s letter on Transvaal suzerainty
- Suzerainty question
- Article 6 controversy
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Palembang
- Acheh War
- D. P. Faure
- Paul Kruger
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.