Palembang Sultanate

Not Srivijaya

formationDrafted from Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1993)

Palembang sits on the same river as the capital of the ancient thalassocracy of Srivijaya, and the fact is worth addressing before anything else, because it explains nothing about the sultanate that actually governed the city from 1659.

Srivijaya's own attested history ends in the thirteenth century, and nearly four hundred years separate its disappearance from Palembang's own sultanate. In between, the region passed through Javanese overlordship, Islamic conversion, and the political reshuffling that followed the fall of Melaka to the Portuguese in 1511 — Malay traders and rulers displaced from the strait scattered to found or reinforce a scatter of successor ports, of which Palembang, on its own river with its own hinterland, was one among several rather than an obvious heir to anything.

What actually founded the sultanate

Andaya's study treats 1659, and the reign of Susuhunan Abdurrahman, as the point at which Palembang's ruling house is properly called a sultanate: a Muslim polity with its own claim to legitimacy, its own relationship to the Dutch East India Company then extending its reach across the Java Sea and the strait, and its own defined territory running up the Musi river into the tin and pepper country of the interior.

Nothing about Abdurrahman's own claim to rule invoked Srivijaya. The ancient thalassocracy was not a memory the sultanate's founders were working to restore, in the way the Sasanians invoked the Achaemenids or the way later Indonesian nationalism would eventually invoke Srivijaya itself as a symbol of pre-colonial greatness. It was simply the ground the new state happened to occupy, four centuries after the older one had stopped occupying it for reasons the sultanate's own founders had no particular reason to investigate.

What the sultanate actually was

A downstream capital controlling the mouth of a major river, taxing the traffic that came down it, and dealing directly with the Dutch company that wanted the tin and pepper the upriver country produced — that is what the sultanate actually was, and it is a shape that owes far more to the general pattern of river-mouth sultanates common across the Sumatran and Bornean coasts in this period than to anything specific to the ground's own older history.

Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1993) · Boy Lawson / Wereldmuseum Amsterdam · CC BY-SA 3.0

To live as brothers

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1993)

Palembang's most consequential relationship for most of its history was not with a European trading company. It was with Jambi, the neighbouring sultanate on the next river system north, and Andaya's study — which treats the two states as a single subject rather than as separate case studies — is organised entirely around understanding why that relationship kept the shape it did.

Kinship as a political idiom

Malay political thought in this region did not describe the relationship between two neighbouring courts primarily in the vocabulary of alliance and rivalry a European observer would reach for first. It described it through kinship: two rulers, two courts, two river systems draining the same stretch of eastern Sumatra were "brothers", and the language of brotherhood carried real content — an expectation of mutual support, a hierarchy of relative seniority that mattered and was argued about, and an obligation to reconcile after a quarrel rather than to treat a quarrel as final.

That is not a metaphor imposed after the fact. It is, in Andaya's reading, the actual framework Palembang's and Jambi's own rulers used to describe their dealings with each other, in correspondence and in the terms they negotiated with the Dutch East India Company, which had to learn to operate inside a political idiom it had not invented and did not fully control.

Upstream and downstream

The second organising idea Andaya draws from the material is the relation between an upstream and a downstream: the interior country that produced tin and pepper and the river-mouth capital that controlled the port those goods had to pass through to reach the outside world. Palembang and Jambi were each, internally, an upstream-downstream pair in exactly this sense, and the two sultanates' dealings with each other were frequently disputes over which capital's downstream authority a given stretch of upstream country actually owed obedience to.

Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1993) · Wereldmuseum Amsterdam · CC BY-SA 3.0

Cyclical hostility, and why it never became final

Palembang and Jambi fought each other, competed for the same upstream tributaries, and periodically broke off relations entirely across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. None of those quarrels produced a permanent conquest of one sultanate by the other. The kinship idiom described above supplies part of the explanation: two courts that described each other as brothers had a vocabulary already available for reconciliation that two courts describing each other only as rivals would not have had, and they used it, repeatedly, across generations.

Tin from the island

peakDrafted from Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1993)

Palembang's wealth through the eighteenth century rested on two exports, and the more important of the two was not grown at all.

Bangka

The island of Bangka, off the mouth of the Musi, held tin deposits that became commercially significant from the early eighteenth century, and the sultanate held authority over the island and its output. Tin, unlike pepper, was not subject to the same boom-and-bust cycles of taste and supply that periodically undercut Southeast Asian pepper producers, and a sultanate with reliable access to it had a revenue base considerably more stable than most of its pepper-exporting neighbours.

Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1993) · Wereldmuseum Amsterdam · CC BY-SA 3.0

The Dutch East India Company pursued a tin monopoly contract with Palembang much as it pursued pepper monopolies elsewhere: a fixed price, a guaranteed buyer, and a relationship that bound the sultanate to the Company's own commercial interests while nominally leaving its sovereignty intact. Andaya's account treats the tin trade as the central fact of Palembang's eighteenth- century relationship with the Dutch, more consequential to that relationship than the pepper trade the sultanate also carried on.

Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1993) · Wereldmuseum Amsterdam · CC BY-SA 3.0

Pepper, and the upstream country

Pepper continued to be grown in the upriver country behind Palembang itself, supplying the second half of the sultanate's export economy and connecting Palembang's downstream authority to the same kind of upstream dependency described in the chapter on Jambi: a capital that needed the interior's produce and a series of upstream lineages and local rulers whose cooperation in actually getting that produce downriver could not simply be commanded.

What the combination bought

A sultanate producing both a globally significant supply of tin and a steady quantity of pepper had leverage a purely agricultural or purely maritime state on this coast typically lacked: it could negotiate with a European trading company from a position where its cooperation was worth protecting rather than worth simply extracting by force, for as long as the Company judged a working sultanate more valuable than a conquered one. That calculation, on the Dutch side, would eventually change, and the chapters that follow describe what happened when it did.

The British come first

contractionDrafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)

Palembang's final crisis began with the wrong European power. Before the Dutch ever came to take the city by force, the British had already done so once.

A massacre during a change of colonial hands

When Britain took Java from Dutch and French control during the Napoleonic Wars, the reigning sultan at Palembang, Mahmud Badaruddin II, used the disorder of the transition to move against the Dutch garrison that had remained in the city — accounts describe a massacre of the garrison's personnel in 1811, carried out at a moment when neither European power was in a strong position to respond immediately.

The response, when it came, was British rather than Dutch. A British expedition under Robert Rollo Gillespie was sent to punish Palembang for the killing of what had, until recently, been an enemy garrison but was now an inconvenient precedent for a colonial power trying to establish its own authority over Java and its dependencies. The expedition took the city, deposed Badaruddin II, and installed a more compliant relative in his place.

What the episode established

Badaruddin II did not stay removed. He returned to the throne once the British restored Dutch rule over the East Indies at the peace settlement following Napoleon's defeat, and resumed governing Palembang much as before. But the episode had demonstrated, to Badaruddin II and to whichever European power held Java next, that an outside naval force could take the city, depose its ruler, and install a replacement without needing anything resembling the sultanate's own consent.

Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008) · Leiden University Libraries · CC BY 4.0

That was a lesson the Dutch, resuming control of the East Indies after 1816, had every reason to have absorbed themselves. When the same sultan who had massacred their garrison in 1811 proved equally difficult to manage under renewed Dutch authority, they already had a precedent for how to handle him.

The sultan goes to Ternate

endDrafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)

Restored Dutch authority and a sultan who had already demonstrated, in 1811, what he would do to a garrison he judged vulnerable were never going to coexist peacefully for long. The war that ended the sultanate began in 1819.

Two years of fighting

Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II's resistance against renewed Dutch attempts to assert direct control over Palembang and its tin and pepper revenue proved considerably more effective than the Dutch initially expected: Badaruddin II's forces won engagements against Dutch expeditions in 1819, delaying what colonial planners had presumably expected to be a brief punitive campaign into a genuine war lasting into 1821.

It ended the way most such contests on this coast eventually did. Dutch forces took Palembang on 25 June 1821, after a campaign that combined naval bombardment with a land assault the sultanate's own defences could not indefinitely withstand. Badaruddin II was captured, brought to Batavia, and within a matter of weeks exiled to Ternate in the far eastern archipelago — a location chosen, as with other deposed rulers this coast produced, for being as far as practically possible from any territory the exile might still command loyalty in.

Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008) · Unknown · Public domain

The puppet, and the end of the office itself

The Dutch did not immediately abolish the sultanate outright. They installed a more compliant relative of Badaruddin II on the throne in his place, repeating the pattern the British had already established a decade earlier. That arrangement lasted only until 7 October 1823, when the Dutch colonial government formally abolished the Palembang sultanate and annexed its territory directly into the structure of the Dutch East Indies.

Two attempts, by two different European powers a decade apart, to solve the problem of an inconvenient sultan by replacing him with a more manageable one had each ended the same way: not with a durable puppet government, but with the office itself judged not worth maintaining at all.

What was left on the river

afterlifeDrafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)

Mahmud Badaruddin II died in exile at Ternate in 1852, more than three decades after the war that had ended his rule and thirty years after the Dutch had formally dissolved the sultanate itself. He never returned to the Musi river, and no restoration was ever attempted in his name or his descendants'.

Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008) · Si Gam · CC BY-SA 4.0

A resistance remembered longer than the state it defended

Independent Indonesia would eventually recognise Badaruddin II as a national hero, in the same pattern seen elsewhere on this coast: rulers whose armed resistance to Dutch expansion outlived, in national memory, the two centuries of ordinary trade and diplomacy that preceded it. The sultanate's long relationship with Jambi, its Bangka tin contracts, and its place in the routine commerce of the Dutch East India Company generated the bulk of what survives in the documentary record; the two years of war at the very end of its existence generated most of what the sultanate is now actually remembered for.

The river went on being a river

Palembang itself continued as a city and, eventually, as a major administrative and commercial centre of Dutch and then Indonesian South Sumatra, its position at the mouth of the Musi doing the same geographic work under colonial and national administration that it had done for the sultanate and, at a distance of centuries neither state had any working memory of, for Srivijaya before it. Modern Palembang draws on that older, pre-Islamic history as a source of civic identity today in a way the sultanate's own rulers, described at the start of this account, never did or needed to.

What that sequence adds up to

Three states, on the same stretch of river, separated from each other by centuries and by every marker — religion, ruling house, relationship to the outside world — that would ordinarily distinguish one polity from a wholly unrelated one. Srivijaya, Palembang's own sultanate, and the modern city that claims descent from both without being continuous with either: the river outlasted all three arrangements, and each one used it for exactly as long as it could.