Notes on the history of Kedah
Sir Richard Winstedt’s “Notes on the History of Kedah” (1936) is a supplementary study to his larger History of Malaya, tracing the state’s political and commercial history from prehistoric archaeological evidence through the nineteenth-century Siamese conquest. The article’s overarching concern is how Kedah’s strategic position at the northern end of the Strait of Malacca made it a perpetual object of contention among Siamese, Portuguese, Dutch, English, Bugis, and Malay actors, none of whom could achieve lasting control. Winstedt argues that the state’s geography—too far north for effective Dutch blockade, too close to India for European monopoly, and too weak to resist Siamese imperial pressure—determined its fate more than any single political decision.
Summary
Winstedt structures the narrative around six thematic chapters rather than a strict chronology, moving from prehistoric archaeology through successive phases of external domination. The early chapters establish Kedah’s position within the Siamese sphere of influence from the thirteenth century and its conversion to Islam, which an Achinese account dates to 1474 and which Winstedt’s royal genealogy in the appendix places a century earlier still. The Portuguese sack of Kedah’s ports by Furtado in 1611 and the subsequent Achinese conquest under Iskandar Muda in 1619 are treated as the twin shocks that disrupted Kedah’s traditional trade networks and introduced a new Muslim imperial rival to the south.
The middle chapters constitute the article’s most substantial contribution, drawing extensively on the Dutch Dagh-Register and English Factory correspondence to reconstruct the commercial rivalry of the seventeenth century. Winstedt demonstrates that the 1642 treaty between Kedah and the Dutch East India Company—granting the Company half the state’s tin output at 31¼ reals per bahar—was an illusion from the outset, as the Sultan continued trading freely with Coromandel and Bengal merchants. The resulting Dutch blockade, maintained intermittently from 1659 through the 1670s, failed to break Kedah’s will and instead drove the state into closer contact with English private traders like Mr. Lock, whose elephant and tin operations the Dutch could not suppress. Winstedt is equally frank about English failure: the London Company, lacking Amsterdam’s resources and Stuart patronage, never established a durable foothold.
The final chapters trace the Bugis intervention from the 1720s onward and its consequences. The five Bugis brothers’ campaigns in Kedah and their marriage alliances with the Malay royal house created a new power dynamic that the Sultan of Kedah could not control, ultimately prompting him to seek British protection. Winstedt shows how Francis Light’s 1771 grant of the Kedah port was motivated not by commercial calculation but by the Sultan’s fear of Selangor’s Bugis, and how the Siamese conquest of 1821 resolved a contest that the British had been unable to manage. The ex-Sultan’s long exile at Penang and his repeated, futile attempts to recover his throne illustrate the limits of British power in the region before the formal boundary treaty of 1869.
Key Findings
- The 1642 treaty between Kedah and the Dutch East India Company fixed the tin price at 31¼ reals per bahar (3 pikul) and required all foreign traders to present passes from Malacca; the Sultan’s son renewed the engagement on 11 July 1642 (pp. 163–164).
- The crew of the Dutch galliot Exter massacred 30–33 persons, including two women and two infants, on a Moor ship in the Kedah river in 1663; four ringleaders were broken on a cross and beheaded, five hanged, and eight had the sword put over their heads (p. 166).
- The Dutch blockade of Kedah, maintained from 1659, required twice-yearly dispatch of one armed yacht of 70–80 tons and a sloop with 65 men; Balthasar Bort reported in 1678 that the outstanding claim against the Sultan stood at fl. 55,784.8.8 (pp. 165, 172).
- The Bugis five brothers were promised 15 bahara of dollars for their 1724 intervention in Kedah’s succession dispute; Raja Haji demanded payment of 12 bahara still outstanding in 1770, triggering his successful campaign against the state (pp. 176–177).
- In 1826 the ex-Sultan Ahmad Taju’d-din Halimshah was settled at Malacca on an annuity of $10,000 per year, the Company purchasing his Penang house and providing a transport ship (p. 181).
- The 1838 campaign of Tengku Muhammad Said fielded an estimated 10,000 men; the Siamese garrison at Kedah fort numbered only 70 Siamese and 300 Malays, and the fort fell after the besiegers used captured Malay women as a human shield (p. 183).
Conclusion
Winstedt’s definitive takeaway is that Kedah’s history is one of structural vulnerability: its position at the confluence of the Siamese, Indian Ocean, and Malay worlds made it a prize that no single power could hold without the active cooperation of others, and its rulers’ repeated attempts to play these powers against each other—first the Portuguese against Siam, then the English against the Dutch, then the British against the Bugis—ultimately delivered the state into Siamese hands. The British acquisition of Penang and the imperialist turn of Siam in the early nineteenth century were the only forces capable of checking Bugis expansion, and even these could not preserve Kedah’s independence.
Context
- The article draws primarily on the Dutch Dagh-Register (Batavia), Balthasar Bort’s 1678 Report on Malacca, the English East India Company Factory papers (Surat, Madras, Bengal), and Malay chronicles including the Kedah Annals and al-Tarikh Salasilah; Winstedt’s own earlier publications on Kedah port laws (1928) and the Tuhfat al-Nafis (1932) are also incorporated.
- As a foundational synthetic history written by the pre-eminent British scholar of Malay affairs, the article established the standard narrative framework for Kedah’s early modern history and remains a key reference despite the subsequent publication of the full Dagh-Register and new archival work.