The Raffles Treaty with Acheh of 1819 was the agreement negotiated between Raffles — then acting in the service of the British East India Company — and “Johor Allum as king of Acheen,” by which the British sought to establish friendly relations with the Sultanate of Acheh at the close of the long decline that had followed the great days of the seventeenth-century port-kings. The treaty was examined in detail by P. H. van der Kemp in a recent essay published in the Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië, in which long extracts were quoted from the archives of the India Office.
Background of the treaty
The treaty of 1819 was the latest in a series of arrangements made by the British at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1786 Warren Hastings had received from the then Sultan of Acheh a discourteous letter in reply to an expression of goodwill, and in the same year Captain Francis Light had pointed out to the Governor-General of Bengal that a settlement at Pulau Pinang possessed greater advantages than one on the Achehnese coast, “the inhabitants [being] rigid and superstitious Mohammedans, sullen, fickle and treacherous.” The arrangements made by the Company at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century were, as Snouck Hurgronje puts it, “overridden in the most insulting way” by the Achehnese.
The status of Johor Allum
The treaty was concluded with “Johor Allum as king of Acheen” — a description which already implied the doubt that the Company itself entertained as to his authority. The Chairman of the Company wrote to Bengal on the 4th August 1824: “that chief, so far as we can collect from your correspondence, not having possessed an established authority in the country which he assumed to represent, has never been in a situation to maintain the relations into which he entered.” The treaty thus suffered at its very signing from the same defect that the Dutch ordinance of 1881 would suffer from later: it was concluded with an authority that had no effective control over the territory to which it related.
The condition of Acheh
The condition of Acheh that gave the treaty its empty character was the same that had prevailed for two centuries. Complaints of robbery and murder on board ships trading in Achehnese parts had grown to be chronic. Of central authority there had been none for some centuries back; the country was practically split up into countless miniature states under chiefs whose power depended on personal energy and who were generally in a state of warfare with their neighbours, unless in peace and alliance with them for the joint perpetration of their national offences. The foreigner who had dealings with the Achehnese, as soon as he found himself in difficulties, sought vainly for some authority that might redress his wrongs. Such had been the situation since the seventeenth century, when the Sultanate of Acheh lost its control over the great chiefs of the State; and even when the power of the Achehnese princes was at its height, the foreigner could find no security for life or property in the country.
Aftermath
The treaty of 1819 was followed, in 1824, by the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London, by which Acheh was left in the Dutch sphere of influence. The Chairman’s letter of August 1824 closed the British attempt to maintain relations with the Achehnese court, and the treaty itself passed into the archives, from which Van der Kemp afterwards drew the long extracts quoted by Snouck Hurgronje in his introduction to The Achehnese.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.