The Contest for North Sumatra 1858-1898

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Published: 1969
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Author: Anthony Reid
Genre: Aceh (Indonesia) Britain, Netherlands, History
Paperback: 333 pages
Condition: 5/10 (Used, Minor peeling on book spine, visible signs of heavy wear & watermark)

The forces of nineteenth-century European expansion came to North Sumatra through two divergent channels: commercially the region was dominated by the British port of Penang; politically, however, Britain had yielded to Holland in the London Treaty of 1824 any eventual imperial ambitions there. During the early nineteenth century the two western forces cancelled each other out, enabling Atjeh, as the predominant indigenous power, to maintain her independence. But in the heightened commercial and imperial competition of the second half-century the earlier balance broke down. Instead of softening the direct collision of colonized and colonizers, the role of the British third party contributed to embittering the conflict still further. In 1873 the Dutch plunged precipitately into a war against Atjeh which they were neither strong enough to win by force nor flexible enough to win by diplomacy. Both failings were connected with the place occupied in Dutch colonial thinking by the stronger neighbour across the straits. The result was one of the most destructive colonial wars ever fought, which drained the Netherlands Indian economy for over thirty years and turned one of the most prosperous South-East Asian States into an embittered backwater. A deep division was created in the Atjehnese body politic which has endured to the present, making that state an uneasy member both of Netherlands India and independent Indonesia. A touch of nobility was given to these tragic events only by the courage and skill of many Atjehnese both in diplomacy and guerrilla war, even though these qualities too were
sacrificed in an ultimately hopeless cause. For the first time in English the causes of this protracted war are here examined in detail, primarily on the basis of Dutch and British archival material. The analysis is carried to the end of the century, when the Dutch sealed Atjeh's fate by definitely adopting a policy of force, thereby crossing the threshold to the high colonial period in Indonesia as a whole.


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