Treaty between his Britannick Majesty and the King of the Netherlands

Respecting Territory and Commerce in the East Indies

Signed at London,

March 17, 1824

Presented to both houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty

1824

The treaty is absolutely complete paginating with fifteen pages and measures 31 x 21 cm approximately. The treaty was presented to both houses of Parliament in 1824 and was printed by R.G. Clarke. The treaty comes from a larger volume of Parliamentary Papers, and comes in a modern attractive blue buckram binding,and is in excellent condition with very little foxing. This paper would have been presented to British Members of Parliament, before the treaty was ratified. The text comes in three languages (English, Dutch and French). Early papers from Parliament are now quite scarce and no other copy is for sale online. Some images have been provided above, for you to examine the condition and contents of the paper.

The Treaty is rare with no copy listed in the WorldCat Database and no copy is for sale online.

The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 was designed to solve many of the issues that had arisen due to the British occupation of Dutch properties during the Napoleonic Wars. The British establishment of Singapore on the Malaya Peninsula in 1819 led by Sir Stamford Raffles exacerbated the tension between the two nations, especially as the Dutch claimed that the treaty signed between Raffles and the Sultan of Johore was invalid, and that the Sultanate of Johore was under the Dutch sphere of influence. The questions surrounding the fate of Dutch trading rights in British India and formerly Dutch possessions in the area also became a point of contention between Calcutta and Batavia. In 1820 negotiations to clarify the situation in Southeast Asia started under pressures from British merchants with interests in the Far East.

 The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 officially divided the Malay world into two; Malaya, which was ruled by the United Kingdom, and the Dutch East Indies, which was ruled by the Netherlands. The successor states of Malaya and Dutch East Indies are Malaysia and Indonesia, respectively. The line that separated the spheres of influence between the British and the Dutch ultimately became the border between Indonesia and Malaysia (with a small segment becoming the border between Indonesia and Singapore).

The treaty came at a time when the influence of the British East India Company in Malaya and Java was waning, and the individual merchant was gaining more influence within Great Britain. The emphasis on territory and sphere of influence is consistent with former East Indian Company policies in India and elsewhere, but even as the four-year long negotiations went on, the existence of Singapore strongly started to favor the newly independent merchants and their houses. The treaty of 1824 and the declining influence of the East Indian Company led to the rise of Singapore as a free port and is an example of early British free trade imperialism at its best.