Europe (Dutch: Europa) is the continent from which the metropolitan governments in London and The Hague directed their respective Indian and Archipelago affairs throughout the period covered by Van der Kemp’s study of the Atjeh agreement of 1819. Although the events of the treaty itself unfolded in Achehnese and British Indian waters, the political impulses behind them — and the eventual settlement embodied in the London treaty of 17 March 1824 — originated in European cabinets.
Van der Kemp repeatedly invokes “Europe” as the locus of strategic decision-making. The instructions under which Raffles and Coombs acted were “instructions from Europe,” which Raffles himself interpreted as contemplating “the formation of a mere” commercial establishment, but which, he argued, “evidently look to the establishment of an European influence, that is to say” an active political intervention in Achehnese affairs (Van der Kemp, 1900, p. 188). The framing reveals how thin the line was, in the early nineteenth-century imagination, between commerce and sovereignty, and how strongly European rivalries could be projected onto the Eastern Seas.
The convention of 24 January 1817, Van der Kemp notes, had been “submitted to the decision of the governments in Europe” because the points in dispute — chiefly financial claims between the two colonial powers — were too weighty for local officials to settle (p. 193). Similarly, the Sumatra Treaty of 1871 and its attendant negotiations over the Dutch Guinea Coast were conducted between cabinets in Europe, with metropolitan ministers like Falck and De Putte shaping policy from afar. The repeated refrain “permission from Europe” recurs when Van der Kemp discusses whether the Netherlands India government might open new offices abroad without consulting The Hague.
Van der Kemp also uses “Europe” in a more cultural sense, contrasting the civilised standards of beschaafd Europa with the rougher ways of the Sumatran and Achehnese coast-dwellers, and observing that Acheh had, by his day, “driven out every European nation” that had attempted to settle there in earlier centuries. The continent thus figures both as the seat of imperial authority and as the standard against which the colonial encounter was measured.
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.