Raffles’ raid on Palembang in 1819 — in Van der Kemp’s phrase the tocht naar Palembang — was an armed expedition ordered by Sir Stamford Raffles against the sultanate of Palembang in southern Sumatra, a region claimed by the Netherlands as lying within its sphere of influence under the conventions then subsisting between the two colonial powers. Van der Kemp treats it as a paradigmatic case of an unauthorized British incursion onto Dutch-claimed territory, and draws a direct comparison between it and the later Jameson raid against the Transvaal.
The episode belongs to the period immediately preceding the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 17 March 1824, when the frontiers of British and Dutch influence in the archipelago had not yet been formally settled. From Bencoolen, where he served as lieutenant-governor, Raffles had long chafed at the restrictions imposed on British activity on Sumatra and had been the moving spirit behind the Treaty of Pedir (1819) and the founding of Singapore. His decision to send an expedition to Palembang — like his intervention in Acheh — was a unilateral move, undertaken without prior sanction from London or from the Governor-General in Bengal.
Van der Kemp had already devoted a separate study to the affair, published in De Gids of February 1898 under the title “De geschiedenis van een Engelschen raid op Hollandsch grondgebied” (“The history of an English raid on Dutch territory”). In the closing pages of the 1900 article he returns to it briefly in order to point the moral that the diplomatic habits of British agents in the East — audacious action first, official disavowal afterwards, with the fruits of the action quietly retained — were by no means confined to the dealings of the East India Company with the Netherlands. The same pattern, he suggests, may be traced in the South African politics of his own day.
The comparison was pointed. In both cases — Raffles’ 1819 expedition to Palembang and Leander Starr Jameson’s raid of 1895–1896 against the Transvaal — a British agent acted on Dutch (or Boer) territory in defiance of existing agreements; in both the home government, while formally reproving the agent, took no steps to undo the consequences of his action; and in both 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. Van der Kemp’s discussion of the Palembang raid thus closes the circle of his argument that the Treaty of 1824, and especially the Acheh reservation attached to it, exhibit on a small scale the same diplomatic methods that were later to produce the Transvaal crisis.
See Also
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Jameson’s raid comparison
- Palembang
- Acheh treaty of 1819
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Bencoolen
- Sumatra
- London Convention on Transvaal
- Faure’s letter on Transvaal suzerainty
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.