Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826) — Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles — was a British East India Company official, founder of Singapore, and Lieutenant-Governor of the Dutch East Indies during the British interregnum (1811–1816), whose diplomatic intervention in the affairs of Acheh forms one of the principal strands in the pre-history of the Achehnese War. As Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen (Dutch: Benkoelen) in 1819, he negotiated the Acheh treaty of 1819 with Sultan Jauhar Alum (rendered Johar Allum in Snouck Hurgronje’s account) at Pedir and, in the same expedition, co-founded the settlement of Singapore with Major William Farquhar. In the Dutch scholarly literature his Acheh mission is treated as a representative case of British intrigue against Netherlands India in the years surrounding the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824).

Background and Appointment at Bencoolen

Raffles had served under Lord Minto in the British interregnum on Java (1811–1816) and was subsequently appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the West Sumatran settlement of Bencoolen in 1817. From that post he watched with growing unease the restoration of Dutch authority in the archipelago after the Convention of 24 January 1817, and he repeatedly pressed the Bengal government to take a firmer line against what he represented as Dutch monopolising tendencies. Although the political superintendence of Achehnese affairs had been assigned by Calcutta to the government of Penang, Raffles intrigued himself into the question on the ground that the Netherlands India authorities were said to have offered support to the rival claimant at Pedir.

The Acheh Commission of 1819

In late 1818 Raffles travelled from Bencoolen to Calcutta to lay before Lord Moira the danger that the Dutch might come to monopolise the China route through the Straits. Moira, already alarmed by the rejection of Farquhar at Pontianak by Van Boekholz and the annulment of Farquhar’s treaty at Riouw by Wolterbeek, decided to dispatch a joint commission to Acheh. Its members were to be Raffles and Captain Coombs, the latter having already conducted a preliminary mission under Governor Petrie. Raffles, as the senior commissioner, was given a casting vote.

The commission reached Penang early in 1819 and immediately collided with Governor Bannerman, who held that the Acheh instructions had to be executed strictly and that the artillery detachment Raffles had brought from Bengal was intended for the Acheh operation rather than for the relief of the Bencoolen garrison. Raffles, on the contrary, claimed a discretion to act as circumstances dictated, and on 19 January 1819, acting on a private communication from Farquhar concerning the advantages of the Karimon Islands, he suddenly weighed anchor and left Penang without taking leave of either Bannerman or Coombs — his detour to the Karimons leading directly to the founding of Singapore.

Treaty with Sultan Jauhar Alum

Returning to Penang on 16 February 1819, Raffles resumed the Acheh commission. He anchored off the capital on 14 March 1819 and spent nearly seven weeks there, during which he and Coombs conducted what he himself described as a «paper war» occupying more than a thousand pages of the Company’s largest-sized paper. Raffles eventually carried his point: the commission sailed to Pedir and on 22 April 1819 concluded the Treaty of Pedir (1819) (also called the Raffles Treaty with Acheh) with Sultan Jauhar Alum (rendered Johar Allum in Snouck Hurgronje’s account). The sultan received arms and 100,000 rupees; in return he undertook to exclude other European powers and to admit a British resident. Even before sailing for Pedir Raffles had taken the unilateral step of dispatching the ship *Minto* under Lieutenant Criddle to notify Sultan Jauhar Alum of the commission’s approach, a proceeding that the Bengal government later described as contrary to the spirit of its instructions.

The treaty was, in Snouck Hurgronje’s account, one of a long series of British attempts to establish friendly relations with the sultanate — attempts which “were overridden in the most insulting way”. The pretender with whom Raffles negotiated was “Johar Allum as king of Acheen”, concerning whom the Chairman of the East India Company wrote to Bengal on 4 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 rested, from the outset, on a misapprehension of the nature of Achehnese sovereignty: a single treaty with a single “Sultan” could not bind the countless uleebalangs of the Three Sagis, still less the chiefs of the dependent coast-states.

Subsequent Career and Assessment

The Calcutta government, while ratifying the treaty, treated it coolly: it observed that the Sultan had no real authority at the capital, that the funds had been negotiated at Penang rather than paid to the Sultan, and that the engagements entered into were unlikely to be observed. Within a few years the treaty had become an acknowledged dead letter, a status confirmed by the London authorities in their dispatch of 4 August 1824. In the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824) negotiations, the British plenipotentiaries George Canning and Charles Watkin Williams Wynn raised the Acheh engagement at the eleventh hour, and the Dutch, having no copy at hand, were led into acknowledging British interests at Acheh — a manoeuvre that the Dutch historian P. H. van der Kemp treated as characteristic of Raffles’s wider diplomatic style.

Van der Kemp’s portrait of Raffles in Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 (1900) is sharply critical but acknowledges his «great good sense» and «genial insight»; the historian contrasts his decisiveness with the bureaucratic caution of Bannerman and Coombs, even while condemning the «over-driving» by which he set aside his colleagues and superiors. Raffles’s own justification of his conduct during the commission is preserved in his letter to O. F. Metcalfe of 30 September 1819 (printed as Appendix 5 of Van der Kemp’s article) and in his well-known letter to Sir Robert Harry Inglis of 12 January 1819, in which he declared that he had «never had a more disagreeable duty».

Snouck draws the details of the Raffles treaty from a “recent essay upon the treaty made with Acheh by Raffles in 1819, in which long extracts have been quoted from the archives of the India Office” — namely, the essay of P. H. van der Kemp in the Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië, vol. LI, pp. 159–240 (The Hague, 1900). The episode belonged to the wider story of Anglo-Dutch rivalry in the archipelago that was temporarily regulated by the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, under which the Netherlands guaranteed the security of trade and shipping in Acheh, and Great Britain undertook to respect the independence of the country. As Snouck observes, the Dutch Government “with great lack of foresight” thus guaranteed the security of trade with “its fanatical and treacherous population, turbulent and warlike to a degree unknown among the other races of the Archipelago”, and made the further stipulation “which rendered its undertaking impossible to carry out” — namely, that it would respect the independence of the country.

The Raffles Dictum on Achehnese Sovereignty

Raffles’s celebrated description of the sultan of Acheh as “revered throughout his whole kingdom, but obeyed nowhere” is quoted by Snouck in a footnote to the chapter on the Dalam, in illustration of the practical impotence of the later sultans. “This feeling of awe”, Snouck writes, “has within the memory of man always been coupled with the conviction that the sole sovereign prince of the country exercised no perceptible influence on the conduct of affairs, and was in fact but an expensive luxury like the documents sealed with the chab sikureuʾeng” (the nine-stamp seal of the sultan). The dictum of Raffles is the more authoritative because Raffles had himself, during his lieutenancy of Java, been in a position to observe at first hand the practical working of native sovereignty in the archipelago; and his verdict on Acheh stands as the contemporary equivalent of the diagnosis of Francis Light and James Price from a generation earlier.

Account from Als officier van gezondheid naar Nederlandsch-Indië (Wøller) — Fort Marlborough and the Anglo-Dutch Treaty

Dr. Johan Wøller, sailing north to Atjeh in April 1904, put ashore at Benkoelen to view Fort Marlborough — “a real fort with walls and bastions and lunettes, where old cannons still powerless as greybeards stood threatening invisible enemies, while heavy balls rested in neat pyramids beside them.” Wøller linked the fort directly to Raffles: “From here ruled Sir Stamford Raffles for five years over Sumatra, after England had to return Java to Holland; this was his last temporary grip on the Indies, which he had governed with such great foresight and as no white man before him had loved and understood.” He noted that Raffles’s residence there was later destroyed “by an earthquake — on the same day that the Austrian ultimatum was sent to Serbia” — and, contrasting Benkoelen’s quiet decline with the settlement Raffles secured for Britain, credited him with having obtained, on relinquishing the fort, “a brilliant compensation — Singapore — which forever prevented that Further Asia became a closed Dutch continent.”

Wøller also identified Raffles as the architect of the restrictive Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 that bound Dutch policy toward Atjeh for the following half-century: it “was still the work of Raffles to prevent that the Netherlands would control both sides of Singapore Strait Malacca.”

Account from Dispereert Niet Vol. XI (1946) — Raffles’s Wider Legacy

The Frisian popular-history series Dispereert Niet recalls Raffles as a British colonial administrator and founder of Singapore who played a pivotal role in the history of Sumatra and Aceh in the period after the Napoleonic Wars, often acting in direct competition with Dutch interests. Appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Benkoelen (Bencoolen) in 1817, a British possession on the west coast of Sumatra, he attempted from that base to expand British influence throughout the island, often in conflict with the re-established Dutch authority. In 1819 he engineered the establishment of a British settlement at Singapore, which he had identified as a key strategic point for controlling the Strait of Malacca. The Netherlands protested, claiming Singapore fell within its sphere of influence, but Britain maintained control. The dispute was resolved by the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824). During his time in Sumatra, Raffles had concluded a treaty with the Sultan of Aceh granting Britain special rights in the sultanate; this treaty was abrogated by the Treaty of London (1824), but its existence illustrates Raffles’s ambitions in the region.

Raffles is remembered as the founder of Singapore and a key figure in the expansion of British influence in Southeast Asia. His actions in Sumatra and the Strait of Malacca contributed to the division of the Malay archipelago into British and Dutch spheres.

Account from Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu

On 22 April 1819 signed a contract intended to bind Aceh entirely to England and prevent settlement by third parties, while willing to trade with them. This Raffles-tractaat was automatically abrogated by the Londensche tractaat of 17 March 1824 (by which England withdrew completely from Sumatra in exchange for Malakka).

Source: J. Jongejans, Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 393, 394.

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.

Als officier van gezondheid naar Nederlandsch-Indië, by Dr. Johan Wøller, trans. Greta Baars-Jelgersma (Utrecht: Erven J. Bijleveld), pp. 140, 144.

“Dispereert Niet: Twintig Eeuwen Historie van de Nederlanden”, Deel XI, by A. Algra and H. Algra (Franeker: T. Wever, 1946).

Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu, by J. Jongejans, Oud-Resident van het Gewest Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden, with a foreword by Dr. H. Colijn (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 393, 394.

description	British East India Company official, founder of Singapore, and Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen whose 1819 Acheh commission produced the Acheh treaty of 1819.
tags	person, british-official, scholar, colonial-official, east-india-company, founder-of-singapore
aliases	Stamford Raffles, Sir S. Raffles, T. S. Raffles, Raffles, Benkoelen's governor, lieutenant-governor of Bencoolen, Sir Stamford Raffles, Thomas Stamford Raffles, Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles

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