James Price was a British East India Company officer who, in the same year 1786 in which Captain Francis Light founded the settlement of Pulau Pinang, wrote to the Chairman of the Company in London setting out the case for preferring Penang to the port of Acheh as the site of a British factory. Together with Light and Warren Hastings, he figures in Snouck Hurgronje’s Introduction to The Achehnese as one of the three contemporary British observers who, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, grasped the practical impossibility of establishing European influence in Acheh without an overwhelming military force.
Price’s testimony, quoted by Snouck at the head of the Introduction, is brief but pointed: “I prefer Penang to the Port of Acheen as being more healthy and entirely free from that oppression, war and confusion which have ever distressed and at length driven out every European nation who has attempted to settle there”. The phrase “driven out every European nation” carried the authority of long experience: Portuguese, Dutch and English traders had all tried, at one time or another, to settle in Achehnese ports, and all had been forced to withdraw before the turbulence and faithlessness of the Achehnese chiefs.
Price’s letter belongs to the same exchange of correspondence that produced Light’s better-known memorandum to the Governor-General of Bengal. The two are quoted together by Snouck as embodying the same diagnosis: that the difficulty of Acheh lay not in any single enemy who could be defeated or treaty that could be imposed, but in the very structure of a country “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”. “Truly Francis Light and James Price, whom we have already quoted, had grasped the situation in its most literal sense. It was necessary ‘to subdue all the chiefs’, and their name was legion!”
The decision taken on Price’s and Light’s advice — to settle Penang rather than the Achehnese coast — deflected British ambitions from northern Sumatra and left the problem of Achehnese disorder to be re-discovered by the Dutch in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Price’s letter, preserved in the archives of the East India Company, is one of the documents on which P. H. van der Kemp drew for his 1900 essay on the treaty made by Raffles with Acheh in 1819 — the essay cited in the same context by Snouck.
See Also
- Captain Francis Light
- Warren Hastings
- Governor R. Fullerton
- Raffles
- P. H. van der Kemp
- Penang
- Pulau Pinang
- Acheh
- Achehnese War
- Treaty of Quedah (Penang cession, 1786)
- Acheh treaty of 1819
Sources
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.
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.
James Price was a British East India Company officer who, in the same year 1786 in which Captain Francis Light founded the settlement of Pulau Pinang, wrote to the Chairman of the Company in London setting out the case for preferring Penang to the port of Acheh as the site of a British factory. Together with Light and Warren Hastings, he figures in Snouck Hurgronje’s Introduction to The Achehnese as one of the three contemporary British observers who, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, grasped the practical impossibility of establishing European influence in Acheh without an overwhelming military force.
Price’s testimony, quoted by Snouck at the head of the Introduction, is brief but pointed: “I prefer Penang to the Port of Acheen as being more healthy and entirely free from that oppression, war and confusion which have ever distressed and at length driven out every European nation who has attempted to settle there”. The phrase “driven out every European nation” carried the authority of long experience: Portuguese, Dutch and English traders had all tried, at one time or another, to settle in Achehnese ports, and all had been forced to withdraw before the turbulence and faithlessness of the Achehnese chiefs.
Price’s letter belongs to the same exchange of correspondence that produced Light’s better-known memorandum to the Governor-General of Bengal. The two are quoted together by Snouck as embodying the same diagnosis: that the difficulty of Acheh lay not in any single enemy who could be defeated or treaty that could be imposed, but in the very structure of a country “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”. “Truly Francis Light and James Price, whom we have already quoted, had grasped the situation in its most literal sense. It was necessary ‘to subdue all the chiefs’, and their name was legion!”
The decision taken on Price’s and Light’s advice — to settle Penang rather than the Achehnese coast — deflected British ambitions from northern Sumatra and left the problem of Achehnese disorder to be re-discovered by the Dutch in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Price’s letter, preserved in the archives of the East India Company, is one of the documents on which P. H. van der Kemp drew for his 1900 essay on the treaty made by Raffles with Acheh in 1819 — the essay cited in the same context by Snouck.
See Also
- Captain Francis Light
- Warren Hastings
- Governor R. Fullerton
- Raffles
- P. H. van der Kemp
- Penang
- Pulau Pinang
- Acheh
- Achehnese War
- Treaty of Quedah (Penang cession, 1786)
- Acheh treaty of 1819
Sources
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.
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.