Langkat was a small Malay sultanate on Sumatra’s East Coast, lying between Acheh’s East Coast dependency of Pedir and the neighbouring state of Deli. Like the other petty states of the coast — Deli, Batu Bara, Siak, Kampar, Jambi, Tanah Putih, Balah and Panei — Langkat was in the early nineteenth century practically independent, though it had once formed part of the Achehnese sphere, and it carried on a direct and growing trade with the British settlements at Penang and Singapore. The state is mentioned in Van der Kemp’s article only in passing, but its inclusion among the East Coast ports gives it a place in the wider argument of the study.
In Fullerton’s minute of 1825
The single substantial reference to Langkat in Van der Kemp’s article occurs in Appendix 10, where he prints the relevant passages of Governor Fullerton’s minute of 21 March 1825 on the Acheh treaty of 1819 and the consequences of the treaty of 1824. Discussing the danger that the Netherlands government might, by establishing political influence and military power at the principal sea-ports of Sumatra, put an end to the British trade with the East Coast, Fullerton wrote: “The same reasoning applies to the petty states of Delhi, Langkat and Siack. They are unable to resist any powerful interference from the Dutch and the extensive trade we now carry on with them is liable to the same risk as that of Acheen.” Van der Kemp quotes the passage to show that the Penang government, from the moment the treaty of 1824 was known, anticipated precisely the kind of Dutch intervention that the Bellona mission of 1827 would later attempt.
Place in the wider argument
Langkat’s appearance in Fullerton’s minute is not accidental. The whole commercial argument of the Penang government after 1824 rested on the proposition that the Acheh treaty of 1819 had placed not only Acheh proper but its dependencies — among which Deli, Langkat and Siak were the most considerable — under British protection; and that the independence of Acheh, which the Dutch had guaranteed in the treaty of 1824, must therefore entail the continued independence of these dependencies as well. This was the construction which Palmerston would later reject, clinging instead, in E. de Waal’s phrase, “aan de letter van ‘t tractaat van 1824” — but which the Penang government pressed for half a century, until the Sumatra Treaty of 1871 finally released the Netherlands from the British “voogdijschap” over Acheh.
See Also
- Sumatra’s East Coast
- Sumatra
- Deli
- Siak
- Batu Bara
- Tanah Putih
- Balah
- Panei
- Robert Fullerton
- Fullerton’s minute on Acheh (21 March 1825)
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Sumatra Treaty of 1871
Account from Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu
Area in S.O.K.; has Zuidwest boschreserve adjacent to proposed Silaboehan nature monument.
Source: J. Jongejans, Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 98.
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.
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. 98.