Of treaties and unbelievers: images of the Dutch in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Malay historiography
G.L. Koster’s 2005 article examines how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Malay historiographical texts—specifically the Hikayat Hang Tuah (Johor, c. 1690), the Syair Perang Mengkasar (Goa-Tallo’, c. 1670), and the Misa Melayu (Perak, c. 1760)—constructed literary images of the Dutch VOC as a form of “damage control” to defend the Malay world order of kerajaan and Islam against the challenge posed by Dutch treaties and monopolies. Koster argues that the central impropriety these texts sought to manage was the reduction of royal daulat through the VOC’s treaty-based monopoly system, compounded by the religious impropriety of the Dutch as kafir unbelievers.
Summary
Koster’s study continues a line of research he began on the image of the Portuguese in Malay historiography, extending it to the Dutch as their successors as the dominant European power in Nusantara. The core argument is that Malay historiography functioned as a form of literary policing: when the Dutch presence introduced improprieties—above all, the cession of territory or trade rights through treaties that diminished royal sovereignty—the court scribes had to narratively repair the damage to their patrons’ prestige. The strategy was not to deny the Dutch presence but to reframe it within the conventions of Malay literary genres so that the ruler’s daulat remained intact in the telling.
The three texts illustrate different stages and configurations of this process. In the Hikayat Hang Tuah, Johor’s voluntary treaty with the Dutch (1639) is presented as a favour done to the impotent Dutch by mighty Johor, and the conquest of Malacca is attributed almost single-handedly to the Johorese nobleman Abdul Jamil. The treaty’s advantages for Johor are conspicuously omitted, while its text is described as being chiselled into gold paper—a gesture of veneration that simultaneously signals the gravity of what was conceded. In the Syair Perang Mengkasar, the situation is more acute: Macassar was militarily defeated and forced to accept the Dutch spice monopoly. The poem, written in Malay (the archipelago’s lingua franca) rather than Macassarese, was explicitly intended as propaganda for the surrounding kingdoms. Its “damage control” operates through three imperatives: praise one’s own rulers as embodiments of kerajaan-ideology and Islam, ridicule the Dutch as lacking in aristocratic virtue and as infidels, and defer or suppress mention of the most painful improprieties (the treaty, the defeats). Defeat is explained away by invoking treason within Macassar’s own ranks. In the Misa Melayu, Perak’s contentment with its 1746 tin treaty is undercut by recurring episodes in which the Dutch are shown trembling before the Sultan’s majesty, and the poem about Sultan Iskandar’s 1761 voyage to the sea functions as wish-fulfilment—a heroic epic in which the expected battle with the Dutch never materializes, allowing the court to safely dream of putting the Dutch in their place.
Across all three texts, Koster identifies a consistent pattern: the Dutch are defined by two interlocking attributes—“treaty” and “unbeliever”—that together mark them as fundamentally improper within the Malay order. The treaty represents a mundane infringement on daulat; the unbelief provides the religious vocabulary through which that infringement can be narratively contained.
Key Findings
- The Hikayat Hang Tuah describes the 1639 Johor–Dutch treaty as being chiselled into gold foil with the seals of both parties, and states it remained “binding until the present day without change” (p. 10).
- The Syair Perang Mengkasar records that the Treaty of Bungaya (1667) required Macassar to pay compensation of fifty catties of gold and to cede the fort at Unjung Pandang (renamed Fort Rotterdam) to the Dutch (p. 21).
- The VOC fleet that attacked Macassar in 1666 comprised approximately 21 ships and 600 Dutch troops, together with Bugis contingents under Arung Palakka and Ambonese auxiliaries, under Admiral Cornelis Speelman (p. 12).
- The 1746 Perak–VOC treaty granted the Dutch a monopoly over the tin trade at a price of 30 Dutch reals per bahara, with a toll of 2 reals, and gave them possession of Tanjung Putus where they built a fortified lodge (pp. 23–24).
- The Misa Melayu records that after the 1753 crisis, the Dutch Commissioner requested to buy 300 bahara of tin but the Sultan produced 500 bahara, and the treaty was reconfirmed by written pledges exchanged between both parties (p. 29).
- The Syair Perang Mengkasar was composed in Malay rather than Macassarese, and its narrator explicitly states the poem was written “so that other kingdoms might hear what has happened” and so that “all men of understanding will be in no doubt” about the Sultan’s daulat (p. 17).
Conclusion
Koster’s definitive takeaway is that Malay historiography of this period operated as a system of “damage control” in which the literary conventions of each genre—historical romance, heroic epic, genealogical chronicle—were deployed to neutralize the improprieties introduced by the Dutch. The image of the Dutch that emerged was defined by the twin notions of “treaty” and “unbeliever,” and the texts’ primary function was not to record history accurately but to preserve the narrative integrity of royal daulat in the face of a foreign power that, however useful, fundamentally challenged the Malay order of things.
Context
- The article draws on primary Malay texts (Hikayat Hang Tuah, Syair Perang Mengkasar, Misa Melayu, Bustan as-Salatin, Hikayat Aceh) read against VOC archival sources and modern historical reconstructions by Andaya, Watson-Andaya, and Skinner.
- Historiographically, the study extends Koster’s earlier work on Portuguese images in Malay historiography (2001) and contributes to the field of Malay literary studies by demonstrating how genre conventions and political patronage shaped the representation of foreign powers in pre-modern Malay narrative.