The United States of America (Dutch Vereenigde Staten van Amerika; often referred to in Van der Kemp’s text simply as Noord-Amerika — “North-America” — and its citizens as Amerikanen or, in English, “the Americans”) is the North American republic whose possible intrusion into the East Indian archipelago exercised both the British plenipotentiaries of 1824 and the Dutch colonial statesman J. C. Baud. In P. H. van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 the United States is one of the great external powers — alongside Britain, Holland, France, Spain and Portugal — by reference to which the diplomacy surrounding Acheh is shaped. The republic’s name appears in three distinct contexts, all centred on a single strategic anxiety: that American merchants and settlers might obtain a footing in the sultanate to the detriment of European navigation and trade.
Article 6 of the Acheh treaty
The earliest mention is in article 6 of the Acheh treaty of 1819 itself, printed by Van der Kemp at p. 173 (PDF p. 17). The sultan’s undertaking reads: “to exclude the subjects of every other European power, and likewise all Americans, from a fixed habitation or residence in his dominions; he also engages not to enter into any negotiation, or to conclude any treaty, with any power, prince, or potentate whatsoever, unless with the knowledge and consent of the British Government.” The singling out of the Americans alongside the Europeans is striking: it shows that, already in 1819, the United States was regarded by British officials as a power distinct from, and commercially comparable to, the European states — too important to be lumped with “every other” power, and too dangerous to be allowed an uncontrolled footing on the northern approach to the Straits of Malacca.
That the article was so understood by contemporaries is confirmed by the letter of Carnegie from Penang, 27 July 1819, quoted by Van der Kemp: “Sir Stamford Raffles has also made a treaty with the old king of Acheen which excludes all other Europeans and Americans.” The Asiatic Journal, drawing on “several authentic private accounts”, likewise reported that the contract “provides for the residence of a British agent, and the security of free and uninterrupted commerce”. Thus the very first British notices of the agreement emphasised the exclusion of the Americans as one of its salient features.
The British concern of February 1824
The second cluster of references (Van der Kemp pp. 199–200, PDF pp. 43–44) arises out of the London negotiations of February 1824. When the British plenipotentiaries produced the Acheh treaty of 1819 on the table on 23 February 1824, the Dutch commissioners were taken aback: the treaty was far from the innocent thing they had supposed, since Raffles had effectively secured British sovereignty. Of equal moment was the accompanying expression of British becommering (concern). Our co-commissioners, the Dutch reported home on 21 February 1824, now communicated for the first time “their concern that, if the sultans of Acheh were left to themselves, the United States of America, or [others] of later date, would sooner or later seek to connect themselves with them and obtain a footing for an establishment, which, in case of war, would tend to the great detriment of British navigation. The readiest means of averting this evil seems to be that the Netherlands undertake to stipulate with the Achehnese that they will never admit any establishment of a foreign power.”
Van der Kemp drily notes that this “driving of North-America towards possessions in the East Indian Archipelago might indeed not be called a mere talk”. In support he cites Baud’s celebrated letter to the Minister of Colonies Falck, dated ‘s-Gravenhage, 28 November 1822, in which Baud advocated vigorous Dutch colonisation of the archipelago as a counterweight against foreign threats to Java. In that same letter, as Mr. P. Myer’s biography of Baud (1878) records, Baud predicted that the North Americans would one day occupy the Philippines — a prophecy strikingly fulfilled in 1898, as the retired colonel W. C. Nieuwenhuyzen had pointed out in De Nederlandsche Spectator of 10 December 1898.
The historiographical misreading
The third reference (Van der Kemp p. 207, PDF p. 51) is of a different character: it is Van der Kemp’s polemical correction of later Dutch historians who had misread article 6 of the Acheh treaty. The historian G. Lauts had asked, in his Geschiedenis vol. VI (1866), whether Raffles and Coombs had not, in their “self-willed” treaty of 22 April 1819, “by article 6 excluded from the trade of that kingdom all other European powers and the Americans?” Van der Kemp retorts: “By no means; nor was it self-willed.” The article, he insists, prohibited only fixed residence, not trade; the prohibition on permanent European settlement was not the same thing as an exclusion of European commerce. Smulders in his otherwise good dissertation on the treaty of 1824 had similarly read article 6 as “equally stipulating the exclusion of all trade of other European nations”; and Meinsma, in his Geschiedenis vol. II (1873), had held that, “in consequence”, article 6 of the Raffles treaty had to lapse. The official Nota laid before the States-General in 1873 failed to refute these readings; and so the myth of an exclusive-trade clause took hold in Dutch historiography — a myth whose origin lay in the very American anxiety that had first prompted the British to demand the clause in 1819.
Significance
Taken together, these references place the United States at the heart of the Acheh question. It was the spectre of American enterprise — not the actual presence of American settlers, who were nowhere in Acheh — that gave the Acheh treaty of 1819 its principal political charge; that justified, in British eyes, the unprecedented exclusion of non-European outsiders; and that, five years later, supplied the British negotiators in London with their chief argument for persuading the Dutch to take upon themselves the thankless task of policing the Achehnese coast. The Americans themselves, throughout, remained a power invoked rather than seen — but it was precisely their absence that gave the invocation its force.
Account from DLP-84-Atjeh — American anti-piracy cooperation of 1831 and 1844
The DLP-84-Atjeh pamphlet records that American maritime interests in the mid-nineteenth century overlapped with those of the British and Dutch in the waters off Acheh. American vessels, like their British counterparts, sometimes faced attacks by Acehnese pirates and were compelled to cooperate with Dutch forces in punitive actions — notably in 1831 and 1844. The source notes that “the English and the Americans themselves had to discipline the Acehnese” during those years, indicating a direct, though limited, military engagement to protect trade routes — a cooperation that predated by half a century the larger Dutch campaign of 1873.
See Also
- Acheh
- Acheh treaty of 1819
- Stamford Raffles
- John Coombs
- Carnegie
- Jean Chrétien Baud
- Anton Reinhard Falck
- Philippines
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Straits of Malacca
- Penang
- Smulders
- Elout
- British
- Aceh War
- Treaty of 1824
- Acheh (Atjeh)
- 1831
- 1844
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.
DLP-84-Atjeh.pdf, pp. 2-3.