The Philippines (Dutch Filippijnen; Spanish Islas Filipinas) is the great archipelago of some seven thousand islands lying north of the Moluccas and east of Borneo and Sumatra, which from the late sixteenth century until 1898 formed the chief Spanish colonial possession in the Pacific. In P. H. van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 the Philippines enter only as a single footnote, but in a passage that joins them directly to the central strategic anxieties of the treaty negotiations of 1824: the fear that, should the Achehnese sultans be left to themselves, the North Americans would, sooner or later, “seek to connect themselves with them and obtain a footing for an establishment” — to the great detriment of British navigation in case of war.
Baud’s warning of 1822
The footnote appears at p. 199, in the course of Van der Kemp’s discussion of the British plenipotentiaries’ concern about American ambitions in the East Indian archipelago. Van der Kemp observes that this “driving of North-America towards possessions in the East Indian Archipelago might indeed not be called a mere talk” — and cites, in support, a remarkable letter written by J. C. Baud to the Minister of Colonies Falck, dated ‘s-Gravenhage, 28 November 1822. In that letter, Baud advocated a vigorous Dutch colonisation of the archipelago, so as to provide a counterweight should Java ever be threatened by a foreign power. As Mr. P. Myer’s biography of Baud (1878), pp. 180–191, records, the letter’s author went so far as to predict that the North Americans would one day occupy the Philippines — a prophecy whose fulfilment in 1898 Van der Kemp, writing in 1900, was uniquely placed to appreciate. The retired colonel W. C. Nieuwenhuyzen, Van der Kemp notes, had earned the credit of pointing this out in De Nederlandsche Spectator of 10 December 1898.
The geopolitical setting
The mention of the Philippines belongs to a context in which the Eastern seas were imagined as a single strategic field. Spain, weakened by the Napoleonic Wars and the loss of its mainland American empire, was believed unlikely to retain its Pacific possessions indefinitely; and the rapid growth of the United States — which had fought the Barbary pirates, opened China to the China trade, and dispatched its own whalers and merchants into the Indian Ocean — invited speculation about which power would inherit the Spanish position. From the Dutch point of view the prospect was doubly unwelcome: a North-American Philippines would not only bring a formidable commercial rival within reach of the Spice Islands but would also expose the long eastern flank of the Netherlands-Indian archipelago to a power with no European entanglements and a rapidly expanding mercantile marine.
Connection with the Acheh negotiations
The strategic logic was the same that governed the British concern over Acheh. If the Americans might take the Philippines, they might also — unless prevented by some European pre-emption — seek a footing on the northern tip of Sumatra, where the sultanate of Acheh commanded the entrance to the Strait of Malacca. Article 6 of the Acheh treaty of 1819, by excluding from “a fixed habitation or residence” in the sultan’s dominions “the subjects of every other European power, and likewise all Americans”, was framed precisely to foreclose that possibility. Whether the sultan of Acheh had any real capacity to enforce such an exclusion was, of course, quite another question — and one which, as Van der Kemp shows, reduced the article in practice to a dead letter.
See Also
- United States of America
- Acheh
- Acheh treaty of 1819
- Jean Chrétien Baud
- Anton Reinhard Falck
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Java
- Straits of Malacca
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.