The publication of Van der Kemp’s article Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 in the Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159–239, is the event by which the documentary reconstruction of the Treaty of Pedir (1819) and the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 was placed before the Dutch reading public. The article is signed and dated “Den Haag, Februari 1900” — The Hague, February 1900 — at the close of the concluding paragraph.
Date and Place
The closing words of the article read: “Den Haag, Februari 1900.” The article thus belongs to the closing months of the South African crisis that culminated in the outbreak of the Second Boer War in October 1899, and to the eve of the Acehnese counter-offensive associated with the Dutch military reorganisation of the early 1900s. Van der Kemp’s evident purpose is to draw, at this conjuncture, the lessons of a half-century of Anglo-Dutch diplomatic history for the contemporary Dutch reader.
Scope
The article, which occupies pp. 159–239 of the Bijdragen, is divided into an introduction and six numbered sections, followed by twelve appendices of primary-source material. The sections trace the relations of the European powers with Acheh from the eighteenth century through the Raffles-Coombs commission of 1819, the Treaty of London of 1824, the Article 6 controversy, the paper war of the 1820s–1860s, the Sumatra Treaty of 1871, and the Acheh expedition of 1873. The appendices print, in extenso, the principal documents on which the argument rests: the treaty of 1819 itself, the correspondence between the Dutch and British plenipotentiaries at London, the Fullerton minute of 21 March 1825 and the circular to nine Siak chiefs of 21 May 1828, and the Faure letter on the Transvaal suzerainty question of 28 May 1899.
Significance
The publication is significant not only as a contribution to the historiography of the Acheh War and of Anglo-Dutch relations in the East, but as a sustained argument about the diplomatic methods of British colonial policy. The article closes with a passage in which Van der Kemp draws the lessons of the comparison between the Jameson raid and Raffles’ raid on Palembang, between the suzerainty question of the Transvaal and the Article 6 controversy of the Treaty of 1824. “It will therefore be well,” he concludes, “that in concluding treaties we bear in mind the lessons of history, and not only of our own.” The publication is the occasion on which the comparison was first made in print, and it has remained ever since the principal source for the diplomatic antecedents of the Acheh War.
See Also
- P. H. van der Kemp
- Acheh treaty of 1819
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Article 6 controversy
- Jameson’s raid comparison
- Raffles’ raid on Palembang (1819)
- Faure’s letter on Transvaal suzerainty
- Fullerton’s minute on Acheh
- Sumatra Treaty of 1871
- Acheh War
- 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.