Sultan Jauhar Alum

Properties2
tagsperson, sultan, achehnese, claimant, historical
aliasesJohor Alum, Djohor Alum, Djohor, Jowhar 00l Aulum, Johor al Allum Shah, Jowar Allum Shah, Sultan Lama, Rajah Lama, the old sultan, the old king, Johor Allum, Johor Allum as King of Acheen

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Sultan Jauhar Alum (also rendered Djohor Alum, Jowhar 00l Aulum, Johar al Allum Shah) was the Sultan of Acheh from 1802 until his death in November 1823, “so far as circumstances allowed” — a qualification that captures the fragility of his reign. He is best known as the Achehnese party to the treaty of Pedir signed with Sir Stamford Raffles on 22 April 1819, an instrument that, in the words of the Bengal government, was to remain a dead letter from the day it was signed.

Background and the Acheh succession dispute

Jauhar Alum succeeded his father on the Achehnese throne in 1802, but, as had been the case with every predecessor, he faced a powerful domestic opposition. After ten years of his rule, that opposition judged itself strong enough to seek a replacement, and a faction of the Achehnese chiefs turned to Said Hussein, a wealthy Penang trader of Arab descent (a said) and a remote relative of the sultan’s family. Hussein declined the crown for himself but accepted it on behalf of his second son Syf (the future Sultan Saif ul-Alum), who until then had served as boatswain on his father’s vessels. An expedition fitted out at Penang placed Syf on the throne at Acheh in mid-1815, and Jauhar Alum was driven from the capital.

Expelled from Banda Acheh, the old sultan established his residence at Pedir on the north coast, where he was protected by the powerful local chief Tunku Pakih. For several years Acheh thus had two rival sultans: Jauhar at Pedir (called in the British records the Sultan Lama, Rajah Lama, or “old king”) and Syf, who, when in turn driven out of the capital, fixed his abode at Telok Semawé on the east coast. At Acheh itself the effective authority lay with the federation of the Three Sagis and, above all, with Panglima Polim, chief of the XXII Mukims.

Raffles, the Acheh Commission and the Treaty of Pedir (1819)

When, in early 1819, the Bengal government under Lord Hastings dispatched a joint commission of Raffles and Captain Coombs to Acheh, Jauhar Alum was Raffles’s preferred candidate. Raffles went so far as to send the Company’s ship Minto, under Lt. Criddle, ahead to Pedir to assure Jauhar Alum of the Commission’s approach and to enquire into rumours of Dutch negotiations with him — a proceeding Raffles undertook without consulting either Coombs or Governor Bannerman of Penang. The Commission itself, after seven fruitless weeks on the roadstead of Acheh, eventually proceeded to Pedir, where Jauhar Alum received the commissioners and, on 22 April 1819, concluded the treaty that bears Pedir’s name.

Under the treaty the Sultan promised eternal friendship, granted free trade to the British in his ports, engaged to receive a British resident, and (in the celebrated article 6) undertook to exclude the subjects of every other European power, and all Americans, from fixed residence in his dominions. In return, the British government promised to help him remove the pretender Syf, and immediately placed in his hands arms, ammunition and bills on Penang to the value of 100,000 rupees. Before Syf’s submission could be enforced, the Shahbandar of Acheh was sent to Pedir to offer the old sultan the submission of the three Sagis — a feint that ended in the murder of Tunku Pakih by the Shahbandar.

A “dead letter” and final years

The Bengal government’s report of 7 October 1820 made clear that Jauhar Alum never recovered his lost authority. He “never was in a situation to enable him to carry into execution any stipulation of that treaty”; his remaining years were spent “in one stockade at the mouth of the Acheh River without commanding influence or even respect”, while the whole power at Acheh remained in the hands of Panglima Polim. A letter from the Sultan to Penang of 15 April 1822 — in which he explained that he could not move to the capital because Syf had ruined its houses and carried off its guns, and that he commanded only some 250 sepoys — confirms the picture. After an exchange of letters with the Three Sagis in 1822 and a final mission by Mr. Sartorius in 1823, the Penang government gave up all serious hope of restoring him. Jauhar Alum died in November 1823, leaving legitimate descendants and a disputed succession that further weakened the sultan’s party.

The treaty’s afterlife

Although the Acheh treaty of 1819 was recognised by the London authorities as early as 4 August 1824 as a dead letter, the British plenipotentiaries at the London negotiations of March 1824 unexpectedly raised it at the eleventh hour. The result was the insertion of an Acheh reservation in the Notes exchanged alongside the treaty, by which the Netherlands undertook to respect Acheh’s independence — a clause that, as Van der Kemp argues at length, became the Trojan horse of Anglo-Dutch relations over Sumatra for half a century, until the Sumatra Treaty of 1871 finally removed the reservation.

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.

Johor Allum was a chiefly figure who, around 1819–1824, was treated by the British as “King of Acheen” in connection with the treaty negotiated with Raffles and the subsequent correspondence of the East India Company. He is mentioned by Snouck Hurgronje in the Introduction to The Achehnese as an example of the recurring European mistake of supposing that a single Achehnese chief could speak for, or bind, the country as a whole.

The treaty which Raffles concluded with Acheh was, more precisely, a treaty “with Johor Allum as king of Acheen.” On the 4th of August 1824, the Chairman of the East India Company wrote to Bengal about this same chief, observing that — so far as could be collected from the correspondence — Johor Allum had never “possessed an established authority in the country which he assumed to represent,” and had therefore never been “in a situation to maintain the relations into which he entered.” The remark is one of the clearest contemporary recognitions of the structural fact that there was, in early nineteenth-century Acheh, no sovereign capable of acting as a European treaty-partner in any meaningful sense.

Johor Allum’s case illustrates the fragmentation of authority which had prevailed in Acheh since the decline of the sultanate in the seventeenth century. The country was, as Snouck Hurgronje repeatedly emphasises, “practically split up into countless miniature states under chiefs whose power depended on personal energy,” and the sultan had long ceased to exercise effective control over the great chiefs of the interior. Treaties concluded with such a figure as Johor Allum could therefore have no practical effect on the disorders — robbery, murder, and the harassment of foreign shipping — which formed the original motive of European intervention.

The episode is part of the long prelude to the Achehnese War. It belongs to the same series of unsuccessful British experiments in Achehnese diplomacy as the discourteous reply which Warren Hastings received from the then Sultan in 1786, the warnings of Captain Francis Light and James Price, and the memorandum of Governor R. Fullerton in 1825. All of these pointed, with remarkable consistency, to the conclusion that the establishment of European influence over Acheh was “utterly impracticable without employing a large military force to overawe the inhabitants.” It was this conclusion, finally inherited by the Dutch under the Treaty of 1824 and re-affirmed in the Treaty of 1871, that prepared the ground for the military operations of 1873 onwards.

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.

Sultan Jauhar Alum (also rendered Djohor Alum, Jowhar 00l Aulum, Johar al Allum Shah) was the Sultan of Acheh from 1802 until his death in November 1823, “so far as circumstances allowed” — a qualification that captures the fragility of his reign. He is best known as the Achehnese party to the treaty of Pedir signed with Sir Stamford Raffles on 22 April 1819, an instrument that, in the words of the Bengal government, was to remain a dead letter from the day it was signed.

Background and the Acheh succession dispute

Jauhar Alum succeeded his father on the Achehnese throne in 1802, but, as had been the case with every predecessor, he faced a powerful domestic opposition. After ten years of his rule, that opposition judged itself strong enough to seek a replacement, and a faction of the Achehnese chiefs turned to Said Hussein, a wealthy Penang trader of Arab descent (a said) and a remote relative of the sultan’s family. Hussein declined the crown for himself but accepted it on behalf of his second son Syf (the future Sultan Saif ul-Alum), who until then had served as boatswain on his father’s vessels. An expedition fitted out at Penang placed Syf on the throne at Acheh in mid-1815, and Jauhar Alum was driven from the capital.

Expelled from Banda Acheh, the old sultan established his residence at Pedir on the north coast, where he was protected by the powerful local chief Tunku Pakih. For several years Acheh thus had two rival sultans: Jauhar at Pedir (called in the British records the Sultan Lama, Rajah Lama, or “old king”) and Syf, who, when in turn driven out of the capital, fixed his abode at Telok Semawé on the east coast. At Acheh itself the effective authority lay with the federation of the Three Sagis and, above all, with Panglima Polim, chief of the XXII Mukims.

Raffles, the Acheh Commission and the Treaty of Pedir (1819)

When, in early 1819, the Bengal government under Lord Hastings dispatched a joint commission of Raffles and Captain Coombs to Acheh, Jauhar Alum was Raffles’s preferred candidate. Raffles went so far as to send the Company’s ship Minto, under Lt. Criddle, ahead to Pedir to assure Jauhar Alum of the Commission’s approach and to enquire into rumours of Dutch negotiations with him — a proceeding Raffles undertook without consulting either Coombs or Governor Bannerman of Penang. The Commission itself, after seven fruitless weeks on the roadstead of Acheh, eventually proceeded to Pedir, where Jauhar Alum received the commissioners and, on 22 April 1819, concluded the treaty that bears Pedir’s name.

Under the treaty the Sultan promised eternal friendship, granted free trade to the British in his ports, engaged to receive a British resident, and (in the celebrated article 6) undertook to exclude the subjects of every other European power, and all Americans, from fixed residence in his dominions. In return, the British government promised to help him remove the pretender Syf, and immediately placed in his hands arms, ammunition and bills on Penang to the value of 100,000 rupees. Before Syf’s submission could be enforced, the Shahbandar of Acheh was sent to Pedir to offer the old sultan the submission of the three Sagis — a feint that ended in the murder of Tunku Pakih by the Shahbandar.

A “dead letter” and final years

The Bengal government’s report of 7 October 1820 made clear that Jauhar Alum never recovered his lost authority. He “never was in a situation to enable him to carry into execution any stipulation of that treaty”; his remaining years were spent “in one stockade at the mouth of the Acheh River without commanding influence or even respect”, while the whole power at Acheh remained in the hands of Panglima Polim. A letter from the Sultan to Penang of 15 April 1822 — in which he explained that he could not move to the capital because Syf had ruined its houses and carried off its guns, and that he commanded only some 250 sepoys — confirms the picture. After an exchange of letters with the Three Sagis in 1822 and a final mission by Mr. Sartorius in 1823, the Penang government gave up all serious hope of restoring him. Jauhar Alum died in November 1823, leaving legitimate descendants and a disputed succession that further weakened the sultan’s party.

The treaty’s afterlife

Although the Acheh treaty of 1819 was recognised by the London authorities as early as 4 August 1824 as a dead letter, the British plenipotentiaries at the London negotiations of March 1824 unexpectedly raised it at the eleventh hour. The result was the insertion of an Acheh reservation in the Notes exchanged alongside the treaty, by which the Netherlands undertook to respect Acheh’s independence — a clause that, as Van der Kemp argues at length, became the Trojan horse of Anglo-Dutch relations over Sumatra for half a century, until the Sumatra Treaty of 1871 finally removed the reservation.

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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