The Java War of 1825–1830 — known in Dutch as the Java-oorlog — was the great indigenous uprising on the island of Java led by Dipo Negoro, which engaged the principal military resources of the Netherlands Indian army for the better part of five years and thereby decisively affected Dutch capacity to act elsewhere in the archipelago. Van der Kemp refers to it only in passing, in a footnote to the discussion of Fullerton’s minute of 16 March 1828 on the Bellona mission, where he glosses Fullerton’s allusion to “their affairs in Java” with the parenthetical note: “Bedoeld wordt de opstand van Dipo Negoro” — “the reference is to the revolt of Dipo Negoro.”
Relevance in Van der Kemp’s Narrative
The Java War enters Van der Kemp’s argument less as a subject in its own right than as the explanation of an observable Dutch restraint. In his minute of 16 March 1828 Fullerton had expressed “no doubt” that the Netherlands government would avail itself, to the full extent of its means, of the exclusive right which it conceived vested in it by Article 9 of the Treaty of 1824 to form political relations with the chiefs of Sumatra — but he added, with regard to the probable proceedings of the Netherlands authorities in respect to Sumatra, the qualifying clause “whenever their affairs in Java will permit.” It was to this clause that Van der Kemp’s footnote is appended.
The implication is twofold. On the one hand the Java War, by absorbing the Dutch military and financial effort from 1825 onwards, prevented any early translation of the paper rights accorded by the Treaty of 1824 into effective control on the East Coast of Sumatra. The Bellona mission of 1827–1828 was therefore a predominantly commercial, not a military, expedition; and the Dutch complaints of British intrusion into the Sumatran states during the same years must be read against the background of Dutch impotence on the spot. On the other hand the close of the Java War in 1830 set free the resources that, in the following decade, permitted a more forward Dutch policy on Sumatra — a policy that was to culminate, after further decades of British protest, in the Sumatra Treaty of 1871 and the Acheh War.
Van der Kemp’s passing allusion to the Java War is therefore of a piece with his broader thesis that the history of Anglo-Dutch relations over Sumatra in the nineteenth century cannot be understood without constant reference to the relative strength of Dutch power at any given moment — and that the apparent moderation of Dutch policy in the late 1820s reflected, not choice, but the preoccupations of the war in Java.
See Also
- Dipo Negoro
- Bellona mission to Sumatra’s East Coast (1827-1828)
- Fullerton’s minute on Acheh
- Robert Fullerton
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Java
- Sumatra
- Sumatra Treaty of 1871
- Paper war
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.