The Mansion House is the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, situated in the City of London, and one of the principal venues for public meetings on questions of imperial and commercial policy in the late nineteenth century. Van der Kemp mentions the Mansion House in his closing pages as the site of a public meeting hostile to further British concessions to the Transvaal, held while the 1884 negotiations between the imperial government and the Transvaal deputation were still in progress.
According to the testimony of D. P. Faure — printed in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant of 28 May 1899 and reproduced by Van der Kemp in Bijlage 12, noot c — “while the negotiations were going on, a public meeting was held in the Mansion House, where Lord Shaftesbury was chairman, and where all the speakers had declared themselves against further indulgence towards the Transvaal” (Van der Kemp, 1900, p. 238). The meeting is invoked by Lord Derby in his refusal to insert an article expressly abrogating British suzerainty: he did not wish, Faure recalls, to put weapons in the hands of the parliamentary opposition to attack the ministry. The deputation, recognising the weight of the argument, accepted the omission.
The Mansion House thus figures in Van der Kemp’s monograph as the institutional expression of the “opposition” that had to be appeased by ambiguous treaty language — a recurring theme of his study. Just as the Acheh reservation in the London treaty of 1824 had been inserted to satisfy British domestic scruples, so the suzerainty clause of the 1884 Convention was deliberately left ambiguous in deference to a public meeting at the Mansion House. The episode illustrates Van der Kemp’s thesis that the meaning of colonial treaties was shaped less by the diplomats who drafted them than by the political audiences to whom they were addressed.
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.