London — the seat of the English East India Company’s Court of Directors — is mentioned in The Achehnese in connection with the early British appraisal of the political and commercial prospects of Acheh. In 1786, Captain Francis Light pointed out to the Governor-General of Bengal that a settlement at Pulau Pinang (Penang) possessed greater advantages than one on the Achehnese coast; and in the same spirit James Price wrote to the Chairman of the Company in London, declaring his preference for Penang over the port of Acheen.
The Price Letter
The passage from James Price’s letter, quoted by Snouck Hurgronje from P. H. van der Kemp’s essay in the Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië (vol. LI, 1900), reads:
“I prefer Penang to the Port of Acheen as being more healthy and entirely free from that oppression, luar and confusion which have ever distressed and at length driven out every European nation who has attempted to settle there.”
London thus figures in the introductory chapter of The Achehnese as the metropolis to which the practical experience of the British in the Straits was reported, and in which the eventual decision to abstain from direct intervention in Acheh was effectively taken.
The British Standing Problem
Snouck Hurgronje cites the letter, together with Light’s earlier advice, as one of the documentary proofs that the difficulty of “subduing all the chiefs” of Acheh — their name was legion — had been clearly perceived by British observers at the very moment when the East India Company was first consolidating its position in the Malay Peninsula. In 1825, Governor R. Fullerton similarly wrote that the establishment of European influence over Acheh, “long considered a desirable object,” had been found “utterly impracticable without employing a large military force to overawe the inhabitants.” The deliberations in London that accepted this judgement determined, in effect, the framework within which the subsequent Anglo-Dutch arrangement of 1824 and the treaty of 1871 would allocate responsibilities for the Achehnese coast to the Netherlands.
Account from Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 — London
London (Dutch: Londen) is the capital of Great Britain and, throughout Van der Kemp’s account of the Atjeh agreement of 1819, the focal point of British imperial decision-making. It was the seat of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, of the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, and of the negotiations that produced both the treaty of 17 March 1824 and the later London Convention on the Transvaal of 1884. The city is one of the most frequently named places in Van der Kemp’s monograph, mentioned on more than a dozen separate pages.
In the early chapters of the article, London appears as the addressee of reports from the colonial governments in Calcutta and Penang. James Price wrote from Calcutta in 1786 to the “Opperbestuur” (Supreme Government) in London; the Calcutta administration’s dispatch of 14 January 1819 to London, urging British intervention at Acheh, was the immediate origin of the Raffles–Coombs commission. The Calcutta reports of 7 October 1820 and subsequent correspondence between the Indian and metropolitan governments were addressed “to London” and formed the documentary basis of British policy (Van der Kemp, 1900, pp. 160, 163, 168).
After 1819 London became the direct theatre of Anglo-Dutch colonial diplomacy. The draft convention of 1824 was negotiated there between the Dutch plenipotentiaries (assisted by Captain Elout, son of the minister) and the British commissioners; the surprise disclosure, just as the draft was about to be sent to The Hague for ratification, that a prior British treaty with Acheh existed, gave rise to what Van der Kemp calls the Atjeh-incident. The Atjeh clause was ultimately inserted in the London treaty as a seemingly innocuous reservation and would, half a century later, be invoked to justify Dutch claims to supremacy over all of Sumatra. Van der Kemp notes the irony: “the dead letter of 1819 in the London treaty of 1824” became in turn the seed of the Sumatra Treaty of 1871 and the surrender of the Dutch Guinea Coast (p. 195).
London recurs in the later pages as the scene of the Transvaal suzerainty negotiations of 1884. D. P. Faure, writing to Colonial Secretary Chamberlain and quoted in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant of 28 May 1899, recounts how the Transvaal deputation — including President Kruger — conferred in London with Lord Derby, Sir Robert Herbert, and Lord Rosmead. A public meeting hostile to further concessions to the Transvaal was held at the Mansion House under Lord Shaftesbury’s chairmanship. Van der Kemp draws the explicit parallel: the same pattern of treating a clause as insignificant at the time of signature, only to revive it later as a “war-ram,” characterised both the Acheh reservation in 1824 and the suzerainty article in 1884 (p. 214).
See Also
- Acheh
- Penang
- Captain Francis Light
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1871
- The Hague
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London 1824
- Acheh Treaty of 1819
- Mansion House
- Transvaal
- Captain Elout
- Falck
Source
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.