A sketch of the history of Brunei
H. R. Hughes-Hallett, a Member of the Civil Service, published this sketch of Brunei’s history in 1940, drawing on the royal annals (Tersilah), European eyewitness accounts, official colonial records, and local inquiry to trace the kingdom’s arc from its pre-Mohammedan origins through its zenith under Sultan Bolkiah to its near-extinction as a viable state by the early twentieth century. The overarching argument is that Brunei has been systematically neglected by both historians and philologists, and that the available evidence—fragmentary, contradictory, and often embellished—demands urgent collection before the older generation passes away.
Summary
Hughes-Hallett’s sketch is explicitly framed as incomplete and provisional, assembled from “oblique references” in the bibliographies of neighbouring territories, official records, and local inquiries. The author’s central historiographical problem is the absence of any dedicated Brunei historiography: the kingdom’s own annals (the Tersilah or Selasilah) exist in multiple versions that differ in minor but significant details, attributable to “embellishments and suppressions by the various factions” responsible for their composition. The article therefore reads as much a plea for further research as a narrative, opening with a lament that seven languages spoken in Brunei have received no comprehensive philological treatment and that ancient tombs are falling into disrepair.
The narrative proper moves from the earliest evidence of contact—Chinese coins dating to 600 B.C. found at the mouth of the Sarawak river, and the possibility that Brunei is the “Poli” or “Puni” of Chinese annals—through the Hindu-Majapahit period, the conversion of the first Sultan Alak ber Tata to Islam, and the golden age of Sultan Bolkiah, whose kingdom encompassed the whole of what is now Sarawak and British North Borneo. Pigafetta’s 1521 eyewitness account provides the single most detailed contemporary description of the court and city. From this apex, the article traces a long decline: the civil war of 1662, the cession of northern territory to Sulu, the disruptive monopoly of the East India Company’s pepper trade, the rise of piracy, and the progressive cession of rivers and districts to Sarawak and the British North Borneo Chartered Company throughout the nineteenth century. The primary sources informing this narrative are the Tersilah versions, the 1881 constitutional document setting out the traditional government (four Wazir, eight Chetria, sixteen Mentri), the Kanun code of approximately 50,000 words, tomb inscriptions, and the cession deeds themselves.
The final phase of the narrative concerns the introduction of the British Resident system in 1906, which Hughes-Hallett presents as a rescue from self-destruction. The article closes with a brief account of the early Resident period and an appendix listing the twenty-seven Sultans, noting that the order of three rulers in the eighteenth century remains uncertain.
Key Findings
- The only firmly established date in Brunei history is A.H. 1072 (A.D. 1662), the year Sultan Mahomet Ali was garotted in his garden by his own son’s faction (p. 32).
- Pigafetta’s 1521 account records a population of 25,000 “fires” (families), a city built over salt water, 56 bronze and 6 iron cannon mounted on a brick wall, and a court protocol involving a speaking-tube through which all communication with the Sultan was conducted (pp. 28–29).
- The cession of Sarawak Proper in 1842 was made for an annual payment of $2,500; the cession of the Baram watershed was confirmed by Deed in 1883; the Trusan was ceded in 1844 for $4,500 annually in lieu of $22,000 compensation (pp. 35–38).
- The 1885 ‘Umanah’—a formal engagement by Sultan Abdul Momin that no further territory should be ceded—was followed by the 1888 Treaty placing Brunei’s foreign relations under British control (pp. 39–40).
- When the first British Resident was appointed in 1906, the State had no public expenditure, no salaried officers, no police, no coinage, no roads, no public buildings, and no gaol (p. 42).
- The traditional constitution, as set down in 1881, provided for four Wazir (ministers of state), eight Chetria (subordinate ministers), and a council of sixteen Mentri; succession was not strictly hereditary but arbitrary among the four Wazir, and all important documents required at least two ministerial seals (p. 31).
Conclusion
Hughes-Hallett’s definitive takeaway is that Brunei’s decline was not the product of any single catastrophe but of a cumulative process—territorial cession for inadequate cash payments, the demoralising effect of European trade monopolies, internal factionalism, and the absence of effective governance—that reduced a once-dominant archipelagic kingdom to a “wedge of territory” by 1900. The introduction of the Resident system is presented as the necessary intervention that arrested this process, and the article’s closing emphasis on the absence of even basic public infrastructure at that moment underscores how close the kingdom came to dissolving entirely.
Context
- The author’s credential “M.C.S.” (Member of the Civil Service) identifies him as a colonial administrator, and the article’s framing—particularly its emphasis on the 1906 Resident system as a corrective to Brunei’s self-inflicted decline—reflects the contemporary administrative perspective of the British colonial service in Borneo.
- The article draws on the Tersilah (royal annals) in multiple versions, the 1881 constitutional document, the Kanun code (then preserved in manuscript Jawi by the Chief Kathi), cession deeds, and Pigafetta’s published account; its historiographical contribution lies in being the first attempt to synthesise these scattered sources into a single narrative of Brunei.