The Landsdrukkerij Weltevreden — the State Printing Office at Weltevreden, the southern district of Batavia that had become, by the late nineteenth century, the administrative seat of the Dutch East-Indies colonial government — was the official printer of the colonial state and the publisher of the 1930 compilation Zelfbestuursverordeningen Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden (Self-government Regulations of Atjeh and Dependencies), issued as Serie A No. 9 (Series A No. 9) of the Mededeelingen van de Afdeeling Bestuurszaken der Buitengewesten van het Departement van Binnenlandsch Bestuur (Communications of the Bureau of Administrative Affairs of the Outer Territories of the Department of the Interior). The title page of the 1930 compilation names the Landsdrukkerij (State Printing Office) as its sole publisher, with the imprint WELTEVREDEN 1930 — the State Printing Office is the institutional venue at which the colonial Departement van Binnenlandsch Bestuur (Department of the Interior)‘s Afdeeling Bestuurszaken der Buitengewesten (Bureau of Administrative Affairs of the Outer Territories) committed its third collected bundle of zelfbestuursverordeningen (self-government regulations) to print.
The State Printing Office at Weltevreden
The Landsdrukkerij (State Printing Office) — literally, the “Land’s Printing-Office” — was the official government printer of the Dutch East Indies, the institutional descendant of the colonial-era Landsdrukkerij that had, since the early nineteenth century, printed the Javasche Courant (Java Gazette), the Staatsblad van Nederlandsch-Indië (Netherlands-Indies Statute Book), the Gouvernementsbesluiten (Government Decrees), and the whole body of official regulations, ordinances, and administrative publications by which the colonial state published its acts. By the late nineteenth century, the Landsdrukkerij had been relocated from the old city of Batavia to the new administrative district of Weltevreden — the planned governmental quarter around the Koningsplein (King’s Square, today’s Medan Merdeka) where the Gouvernement (the Government House), the Departementen (the Departments), and the official residencies had been gathered. The Landsdrukkerij at Weltevreden was, in the early twentieth century, the printing-house of the colonial state: it produced the Staatsblad van Nederlandsch-Indië, the Gouvernementsbesluit series, the departmental Mededeelingen (Communications) and Verzamelingen (Collections) of regulations, and the official compilations of colonial-administrative acts of which the 1930 Zelfbestuursverordeningen Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden is a representative example.
Publication of the Zelfbestuursverordeningen compilation (1930)
The 1930 compilation Zelfbestuursverordeningen Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden — the third collected bundle (derden bundel) of zelfbestuursverordeningen (self-government regulations) issued by the Afdeeling Bestuurszaken der Buitengewesten (Bureau of Administrative Affairs of the Outer Territories), as the Voorwoord (Preface) of the compilation itself notes — was published by the Landsdrukkerij at Weltevreden as Serie A No. 9 (Series A No. 9) of the Mededeelingen van de Afdeeling Bestuurszaken der Buitengewesten van het Departement van Binnenlandsch Bestuur (Communications of the Bureau of Administrative Affairs of the Outer Territories of the Department of the Interior). The title page of the compilation gives the imprint in the standard form: WELTEVREDEN 1930 — and the Voorwoord (Preface), signed by the Afdeeling Bestuurszaken der Buitengewesten, records that the publication of the bundle “beteekent een nieuwe stap in de richting, aangegeven in het voorwoord van nummer 5 dezer Serie van de Mededeelingen” — means a new step in the direction indicated in the foreword to number 5 of this Series of the Mededeelingen (Communications). The Landsdrukkerij was, in this institutional arrangement, the printer-of-record for the colonial state’s zelfbestuur (self-government) policy: the venue at which the regulations issued by the zelfbestuurders (self-governors) of the Atjeh landschappen (polities) — under the supervisory approval of the Gouverneur van Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden (Governor of Atjeh and Dependencies) and the Gouverneur-Generaal of Nederlandsch-Indië (Governor-General of Netherlands-India) — were collected, printed, and circulated for the use of the colonial-administrative readership in the Indies and the metropole.
Significance
The Landsdrukkerij Weltevreden’s significance in the Aceh Wiki History record is bibliographic and institutional. The State Printing Office is the publisher of the second of the two principal source-books of the Aceh Wiki History project — the 1930 compilation of Zelfbestuursverordeningen Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden (Self-government Regulations of Atjeh and Dependencies) that, together with Van Heutsz’s 1893 tract De onderwerping van Atjeh, supplies the principal primary-source corpus for the project’s coverage of the Dutch colonial administration of Atjeh. The Landsdrukkerij’s imprint on the 1930 compilation is the institutional marker by which the compilation is identified as an official publication of the colonial state — not a private or commercial imprint but the formal act of publication of the Departement van Binnenlandsch Bestuur’s Afdeeling Bestuurszaken der Buitengewesten (Bureau of Administrative Affairs of the Outer Territories of the Department of the Interior) — and the venue at which the colonial state’s zelfbestuur (self-government) policy in Atjeh was, in the closing years of the Dutch East Indies, given its definitive printed form.
See Also
Source
Zelfbestuursverordeningen Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden, uitgegeven door de Afdeeling Bestuurszaken der Buitengewesten van het Departement van Binnenlandsch Bestuur, Mededeelingen Serie A No. 9. Weltevreden: Landsdrukkerij, 1930, title page and Voorwoord. OCR-filename: 20260719_030404_DLP-112-Zelfbestuursverordeningen_Atjeh_en_onderhoorigheden_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.