Kleiland-aanwinning op Atjeh’s Westkust in 1902 — “Land reclamation (literally: clay-land gaining) on Atjeh’s West Coast in 1902” — is an article by J. L. M. van den Brandhof, published in 1939 in De Indische Gids (The Indies Guide), No. 61, p. 866 e.v., etc., recording an episode of land reclamation — the gaining of new clay-land from the sea — on the west coast of Atjeh in the year 1902. The article is recorded as No. 557 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 kleiland-aanwinning — literally “clay-land winning,” i.e. the gaining of new cultivable clay-soil land from the sea or from swamp — on Atjeh’s Westkust in the year 1902. The term aanwinning denotes the act of gaining or acquiring, and the compound kleiland-aanwinning is the technical Dutch term for land reclamation in which new clay-land is formed, whether by drainage, by embankment, or by natural accretion. The year 1902 falls within the middle phase of the Atjeh-oorlog, at a moment when the Dutch colonial administration was consolidating its hold on the coastal stretches of the west coast even as the interior remained contested. The article thus records a practical episode of colonial land-management in a theatre of war.
Author and venue
Brandhof published the article in De Indische Gids, one of the principal monthly review journals of the Netherlands Indies, which carried articles on colonial administration, economy, geography, and current affairs. The journal’s audience — colonial officials, planters, merchants, and the interested Dutch public — was precisely the readership to which a technical note on land reclamation on the Atjeh west coast would be of practical interest. The pagination “p. 866 e.v., etc.” indicates that the article ran from p. 866 onward and was continued in subsequent issues, a common practice in the journal.
Place in the 1939 Literatuur-Overzicht
The article is No. 557 in the Sumatra chapter (Hoofdstuk III, Nos. 548–658) of Van Meurs’s survey, where it stands among the B-letter entries of the Sumatra chapter, between the Bannink article on the Atjeh-oorlog (No. 550) and the da Costa survey of the Padrie-oorlog (No. 558). Its placement there marks it as one of the Atjeh-specific entries of the Sumatra chapter, and its subject — land reclamation rather than military operations — illustrates the breadth of the Atjeh content that Van Meurs captured: not only the war and its personalities, but also the practical and geographical aspects of the colonial engagement with the Atjeh west coast.
Significance
For AcehWiki, the article is significant as a 1939 retrospective on an episode of 1902 land reclamation on the Atjeh’s Westkust, and as a reminder that the colonial engagement with Atjeh was not solely military but also involved the practical work of land-management, drainage, and the extension of cultivable area. The article furnishes an independent source for the geographical and administrative history of the Atjeh west coast in the middle phase of the Atjeh-oorlog, and it complements the corpus’s existing entries on Atjeh’s Westkust, on the Westkust of Sumatra, and on the wider colonial geography of Atjeh.
See Also
- Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (Van Meurs, 1940)
- H. van Meurs
- atjeh’s-westkust
- westkust-van-sumatra
- westkust-of-atjeh
- Aceh War
- Grepen uit den Atjeh-oorlog (Bannink, 1939)
- De Padrie-oorlog (Costa, 1939)
- De legende van de heilige zeven slapers in het Atjehsch (Damsté, 1939)
- De gevangeneming van den ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh, Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat (Doorman, 1939)
- Acheh
- 1902
- 1939
- 1940
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. 557. Citing: J. L. M. van den Brandhof, “Kleiland-aanwinning op Atjeh’s Westkust in 1902,” De Indische Gids, No. 61 (1939), p. 866 e.v., etc.