P. H. van der Kemp

Properties2
tagsscholar, person, colonial-official, dutch, dutch-official
aliasesP. H. van der Kemp, Van der Kemp, Pieter Hendrik van der Kemp, P. II. van der Kemp (OCR)

12 min read

P. H. van der Kemp was a Dutch colonial historian and contributor to the Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië (“Contributions of the Royal Institute for the Linguistic, Geographical and Ethnological Sciences of the Netherlands Indies”). He is cited by Snouck Hurgronje in the Introduction to Vol. I of The Achehnese as the author of a recent essay on the treaty concluded with Acheh by Raffles in 1819.

Van der Kemp’s essay, published in volume LI of the Bijdragen (pp. 159–240, The Hague, 1900), reproduces long extracts from the archives of the India Office in London. Through these quotations Snouck Hurgronje was able to demonstrate that the arrangements which the British East India Company made with Acheh at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century for the establishment of friendly relations were “overridden in the most insulting way” by the Achehnese side. The essay also documents the correspondence regarding “Johor Allum as king of Acheen,” a figure about whom the Chairman of the Company wrote to Bengal on 4 August 1824 that “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.”

Snouck Hurgronje cautions his readers that “in the English documents quoted there are many writer’s or printer’s errors,” a warning that applies to van der Kemp’s transcriptions as much as to the originals on which they rest. Beyond this, van der Kemp’s work is used by Snouck Hurgronje principally to establish the long historical record of Achehnese intractability towards European trading partners — a record stretching from the discourteous reply sent to Warren Hastings in 1786, through Captain Francis Light’s disparaging report on Acheh in the same year, to the early nineteenth-century negotiations with Raffles and beyond.

Van der Kemp thus belongs to that generation of Dutch colonial scholars — alongside Van Langen, Niemann, and Veth — whose archival labours supplied the documentary foundations on which later writers, including Snouck Hurgronje himself, could construct a more analytical account of Achehnese state and society. His essay remains one of the principal European sources for the diplomatic history of Acheh in the period immediately preceding the Dutch intervention of 1873.

See Also

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.

A historian of the Dutch East Indies

Van der Kemp was one of the most industrious and pugnacious contributors to the Bijdragen in the late nineteenth century. He wrote at length on the relations of the Netherlands with the British in the Malay Archipelago, on the colonial administration of the East Indies, and on the political economy of Java and the Outer Possessions. His articles in the Bijdragen include, beside the present article on the Acheh treaty of 1819, his Papieroorlog (“paper war”) in volume XLIX (1898), his Sumatra’s Westkust treatise in volumes XLVII (1897) and XLIX (1898), and his Riouw-verhandeling in volume LI (1900). In these he repeatedly crosses swords with the British records of the Roosegaarde Bisschop collection and with Dutch apologists such as Falck and Baud, and he insists on the dangers of Dutch naivety in dealings with “our powerful neighbour and natural ally”.

Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 (1900)

The article under review, published in the Bijdragen of 1900 (6e Volgr., Deel VII, pp. 159–239), is a sustained and at times indignant reconstruction of the origins, character and afterlife of the treaty of 22 April 1819 between Sir Stamford Raffles and Sultan Jauhar Alum of Acheh. Van der Kemp traces the treaty from the Acheh succession dispute of 1802–1819 through the Raffles–Coombs Commission of 1819 and the treaty of Pedir, to its afterlife as the “dead letter” of British diplomacy that, in the eleventh hour of the London negotiations of March 1824, was unexpectedly revived and incorporated — by indirection, and against the explicit instructions of the Dutch King — into the Notes exchanged alongside the treaty. The Acheh reservation thus created became, in Van der Kemp’s view, the Trojan horse of Anglo-Dutch relations over Sumatra for half a century, until the Sumatra Treaty of 1871 finally removed it.

The article is notable for its extensive use of primary sources drawn from the Roosegaarde Bisschop collection (the “B-verzameling”) of British India records and from the Dutch state archives, and it prints twelve appendices of primary documents, including the sultan’s letter of 7 November 1786 to Warren Hastings, Raffles’s letter of 31 December 1819 to the Bengal secretary, Raffles’s instructions to Lt. Criddle of the Minto, the correspondence between Thyssen and Wolterbeek, Fullerton’s minute of 21 March 1825, the Sultan of Deli’s letter of 27 August 1824, the Three Sagis’ letter of 4 December 1822, Ibbetson’s minute of 25 February 1824, the London dispatch of 4 August 1824, the Siak correspondence of 1828, and D. P. Faure’s letter to Chamberlain on the Transvaal suzerainty question of 1884.

Method and reputation

Van der Kemp writes with a sharp polemical edge. He is severe on the Dutch plenipotentiaries Fagel and Falck — “we cannot comprehend them, they were really not up to their task, they thought too well of their counterparty” — and on the advice of 12 February 1824 of minister Elout, which he judges to have been “all this very sensible advice” on the Anjer and Tapanuli clauses but inexplicably silent on the Acheh incident that Elout’s own son had been dispatched to communicate. He is no less severe on the British: on Raffles’s high-handed treatment of Bannerman and Coombs in the Acheh commission, on the British plenipotentiaries’ “indirect acknowledgement” of Dutch sole authority over Sumatra even while smuggling in an Acheh reservation, and on the “pecksniffian” tone of the English press in matters of colonial treaty-making. The article closes, dated The Hague, February 1900, with an extended comparison between the treaty of 1819 and the Transvaal convention of 1884, arguing that the two episodes illustrate the same British diplomatic practice of introducing, as an innocuous reservation for the sake of “opposition”, a clause that is later wielded as an instrument of policy.

P. H. van der Kemp was a Dutch colonial historian and contributor to the Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië (“Contributions of the Royal Institute for the Linguistic, Geographical and Ethnological Sciences of the Netherlands Indies”). He is cited by Snouck Hurgronje in the Introduction to Vol. I of The Achehnese as the author of a recent essay on the treaty concluded with Acheh by Raffles in 1819.

Van der Kemp’s essay, published in volume LI of the Bijdragen (pp. 159–240, The Hague, 1900), reproduces long extracts from the archives of the India Office in London. Through these quotations Snouck Hurgronje was able to demonstrate that the arrangements which the British East India Company made with Acheh at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century for the establishment of friendly relations were “overridden in the most insulting way” by the Achehnese side. The essay also documents the correspondence regarding “Johor Allum as king of Acheen,” a figure about whom the Chairman of the Company wrote to Bengal on 4 August 1824 that “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.”

Snouck Hurgronje cautions his readers that “in the English documents quoted there are many writer’s or printer’s errors,” a warning that applies to van der Kemp’s transcriptions as much as to the originals on which they rest. Beyond this, van der Kemp’s work is used by Snouck Hurgronje principally to establish the long historical record of Achehnese intractability towards European trading partners — a record stretching from the discourteous reply sent to Warren Hastings in 1786, through Captain Francis Light’s disparaging report on Acheh in the same year, to the early nineteenth-century negotiations with Raffles and beyond.

Van der Kemp thus belongs to that generation of Dutch colonial scholars — alongside Van Langen, Niemann, and Veth — whose archival labours supplied the documentary foundations on which later writers, including Snouck Hurgronje himself, could construct a more analytical account of Achehnese state and society. His essay remains one of the principal European sources for the diplomatic history of Acheh in the period immediately preceding the Dutch intervention of 1873.

See Also

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.

A historian of the Dutch East Indies

Van der Kemp was one of the most industrious and pugnacious contributors to the Bijdragen in the late nineteenth century. He wrote at length on the relations of the Netherlands with the British in the Malay Archipelago, on the colonial administration of the East Indies, and on the political economy of Java and the Outer Possessions. His articles in the Bijdragen include, beside the present article on the Acheh treaty of 1819, his Papieroorlog (“paper war”) in volume XLIX (1898), his Sumatra’s Westkust treatise in volumes XLVII (1897) and XLIX (1898), and his Riouw-verhandeling in volume LI (1900). In these he repeatedly crosses swords with the British records of the Roosegaarde Bisschop collection and with Dutch apologists such as Falck and Baud, and he insists on the dangers of Dutch naivety in dealings with “our powerful neighbour and natural ally”.

Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 (1900)

The article under review, published in the Bijdragen of 1900 (6e Volgr., Deel VII, pp. 159–239), is a sustained and at times indignant reconstruction of the origins, character and afterlife of the treaty of 22 April 1819 between Sir Stamford Raffles and Sultan Jauhar Alum of Acheh. Van der Kemp traces the treaty from the Acheh succession dispute of 1802–1819 through the Raffles–Coombs Commission of 1819 and the treaty of Pedir, to its afterlife as the “dead letter” of British diplomacy that, in the eleventh hour of the London negotiations of March 1824, was unexpectedly revived and incorporated — by indirection, and against the explicit instructions of the Dutch King — into the Notes exchanged alongside the treaty. The Acheh reservation thus created became, in Van der Kemp’s view, the Trojan horse of Anglo-Dutch relations over Sumatra for half a century, until the Sumatra Treaty of 1871 finally removed it.

The article is notable for its extensive use of primary sources drawn from the Roosegaarde Bisschop collection (the “B-verzameling”) of British India records and from the Dutch state archives, and it prints twelve appendices of primary documents, including the sultan’s letter of 7 November 1786 to Warren Hastings, Raffles’s letter of 31 December 1819 to the Bengal secretary, Raffles’s instructions to Lt. Criddle of the Minto, the correspondence between Thyssen and Wolterbeek, Fullerton’s minute of 21 March 1825, the Sultan of Deli’s letter of 27 August 1824, the Three Sagis’ letter of 4 December 1822, Ibbetson’s minute of 25 February 1824, the London dispatch of 4 August 1824, the Siak correspondence of 1828, and D. P. Faure’s letter to Chamberlain on the Transvaal suzerainty question of 1884.

Method and reputation

Van der Kemp writes with a sharp polemical edge. He is severe on the Dutch plenipotentiaries Fagel and Falck — “we cannot comprehend them, they were really not up to their task, they thought too well of their counterparty” — and on the advice of 12 February 1824 of minister Elout, which he judges to have been “all this very sensible advice” on the Anjer and Tapanuli clauses but inexplicably silent on the Acheh incident that Elout’s own son had been dispatched to communicate. He is no less severe on the British: on Raffles’s high-handed treatment of Bannerman and Coombs in the Acheh commission, on the British plenipotentiaries’ “indirect acknowledgement” of Dutch sole authority over Sumatra even while smuggling in an Acheh reservation, and on the “pecksniffian” tone of the English press in matters of colonial treaty-making. The article closes, dated The Hague, February 1900, with an extended comparison between the treaty of 1819 and the Transvaal convention of 1884, arguing that the two episodes illustrate the same British diplomatic practice of introducing, as an innocuous reservation for the sake of “opposition”, a clause that is later wielded as an instrument of policy.

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