Treaty of Pedir (1819)

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tagsevent, treaty, diplomacy, colonial, anglo-dutch, acheh, treaty-doctrine, colonial-policy, diplomatic-concept
aliasesAcheh treaty of 1819, 1819 Acheh treaty, Raffles' Acheh-overeenkomst, Raffles' Acheh-overeenkomst van 1819, Atjeh-verdrag van 1819, Pedir-verdrag, Acheen treaty, tractaat met den sultan van Atjeh, Treaty of Pedir 1819

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The Treaty of Pedir, signed on 22 April [[1819]] at Pedir on the north coast of Sumatra between Raffles — acting on behalf of the British East India Company and the government of Bengal — and Sultan Jauhar Alum of Acheh, was a nine-article political and commercial agreement that would prove one of the most consequential “scraps of paper” in nineteenth-century Anglo-Dutch relations in the East Indian archipelago. The compact — long known to Dutch historiography by the title of P. H. Van der Kemp’s 1900 study, Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 — was, in Van der Kemp’s judgment, never anything more than a dead letter in the eyes of three English officials themselves, yet it was destined to shape Dutch–British relations over Sumatra for more than half a century.

Background and Negotiation

The treaty was the product of the Raffles-Coombs Acheh Commission (1819), a joint commission sent from Calcutta in early 1819 under Governor-General Lord Moira to settle the long-running Acheh succession dispute and to forestall suspected Dutch intrigues with Sultan Jauhar Alum. By the close of the dispute the throne of Acheh was contested between Jauhar Alum, supported by the Sultan’s party in the capital, and Saif ul-Alum (Syf), who held Telok Semawé. Captain Coombs’ earlier mission of 1817–1818 had failed to produce a settlement, and the Bengal Government at Calcutta therefore equipped the joint commission under Raffles and Coombs, which arrived on the roadstead of Acheh in early 1819.

After a fruitless seven-week sojourn on the roadstead of Banda Acheh — during which Raffles and Captain Coombs waged what Raffles himself termed a paper war running to over a thousand large-format pages — the commission weighed anchor and sailed to Pedir, where Sultan Jauhar Alum held his residence in exile. Before the meeting could take place, the shahbandar (shahbandar, harbour-master) of Acheh had been dispatched with a commission to Pedir, ostensibly to offer the sultan the submission of the Three Sagis but in reality to deceive him. The plot was thwarted by Tunku Pakih of Pedir, who was thereupon stabbed by the shahbandar’s party. With Tunku Pakih thus removed, the way was, as Van der Kemp puts it, “made smooth,” and the commission was received by Sultan Jauhar Alum at Pedir, where the treaty was signed.

The Nine Articles

The articles, as reproduced by Van der Kemp from the texts printed by John Anderson and Smulders, provided for:

  1. Eternal friendship between the contracting parties, neither to aid the other’s enemies (Art. I).
  2. A British engagement to assist the sultan in removing the rival pretender Syf (Art. II).
  3. Free trade at all the sultan’s ports, with fixed duties and no monopoly of produce (Art. III).
  4. The sultan’s agreement to receive and protect an accredited British agent at his court (Art. IV).
  5. Continuation of British commercial intercourse with Acheh and Telok Semawé, even where these were not yet subject to the sultan’s authority, subject only to a temporary blockade by mutual consent; no warlike stores to be furnished to those ports (Art. V).
  6. The sultan’s promise to exclude the subjects of every other European power, and likewise all Americans, from fixed habitation or residence in his dominions; and to enter into no treaty with any foreign power without British knowledge and consent (Art. VI).
  7. The sultan’s promise not to permit the residence of any British subject to whom the resident agent should object (Art. VII).
  8. A British undertaking immediately to furnish the sultan with the arms specified in a separate annex, and a money loan (the well-known 100,000 rupees) repayable at the sultan’s earliest convenience (Art. VIII).
  9. Ratification by the Governor-General of Bengal within six months, the treaty nonetheless taking immediate effect (Art. IX).

Van der Kemp emphasises that article 6 in no way excluded other European nations from trading with Acheh — only from settling there. This distinction, lost sight of in later diplomacy, was to become one of the most fateful points of contention in the negotiations of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 17 March 1824.

A “Dead Letter” with Consequences

Although arms and money were at once handed to Sultan Jauhar Alum and the commission then sailed to Telok Semawé to extract a (worthless) submission from Syf, the treaty was never effective on the ground. By July 1819 Syf was again writing to the governor of Penang as sultan of Acheh and continuing his depredations. Van der Kemp insists that the agreement “never was anything but a scrap of paper in the eyes of three English administrators themselves”. Jauhar Alum never recovered even a fraction of his lost authority; the remaining years of his life were spent in a stockade at the mouth of the Acheh River without commanding influence or respect, while effective power in the capital lay with Panglima Polim and the coastal chiefs pursued their own independent courses.

The Calcutta government expressed its dissatisfaction in a report dated 7 October 1820: it was well enough that Syf had been dropped and a treaty made with Jauhar Alum, but to hand over arms and money without any solid quid pro quo seemed indefensible. Raffles’s own enthusiasm for his handiwork — expressed in his letter to Sir Robert Harry Inglis of 12 June 1819 — Van der Kemp characterises as pure exaggeration: nothing had been gained, and the commission might just as well have stayed at home. As Governor Fullerton would later write in the Pinang Nota of 1825, “no effect, political or commercial, resulted from the conclusion of that treaty which may truly be said to have been a dead letter from the day it was signed”.

Diplomatic Afterlife

Notwithstanding its impotence on the ground, the treaty acquired a potent diplomatic afterlife. When, in February 1824, the British plenipotentiaries Canning and Wynn unexpectedly raised the existence of the 1819 convention during the London negotiations for the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824) — without, as Van der Kemp pointedly observes, any of the Dutch negotiators having actually read the Acheh instrument — it was represented as a mere arrangement for the hospitable reception of British ships. The Dutch plenipotentiaries, who had not read the instrument, accepted that characterisation; only on 23 February 1824, when the text was laid before them, did they discover that Raffles had inserted a clause (article 6) appearing to establish a British protectorate. The result was the famous Acheh declaration annexed to the 1824 treaty, by which Dutch plenipotentiaries guaranteed Acheh’s independence — a clause that would paralyse Dutch policy on Sumatra until the Sumatra Treaty of 1871.

This Acheh reservation, although presented as inconsiderable, became the cornerstone of subsequent British remonstrances against the extension of Dutch supremacy in northern Sumatra. Its weight was still felt at the Sumatra Treaty of 1871, where the Netherlands finally obtained an English renunciation of “all remonstrances against the extension of Dutch authority in any part of the island of Sumatra”.

See Also

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.

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