Article

Brunei

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Brunei

Brunei, an ancient sultanate situated on the southern fringes of the South China Sea, was in its halcyon days Borneo’s most powerful kingdom, enjoying China’s patronage and exercising pervasive influence over significant parts of the island [1]. Its early history was inextricably linked to the maritime trade routes on which it was located, and it emerged as a formidable economic and political force in pre-modern Southeast Asia [1]. By the late nineteenth century, the sultanate’s territorial claims extended along the north-west coast of Borneo, encompassing river systems such as the Meri and Baram, where its Malay middlemen controlled the interior trade in gutta, sago, and birds’ nests [2]. The modern state of Brunei Darussalam, with a population of approximately 341,000 across 5,765 square kilometres in 1997, retains a national ideology of Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB) that continues to shape its cultural and literary life [3].

Historical Origins and Royal Genealogy

The early history of Brunei has suffered from what the Society’s 1998 reprint volume describes as “an inexplicable lack of interest among scholars,” resulting in authoritative accounts of its origins remaining relatively rare [1]. The Society’s Reprint 18, Papers Relating to Brunei, was assembled specifically to address this imbalance, reproducing a series of papers the earliest of which are Hugh Low’s Selesilah (Book of Genealogical Descent of the Rajas of Brunei) and W. H. Treacher’s Genealogy of the Royal Family of Brunei, published in the JSBRAS in 1880 and 1885 respectively [1]. These particular numbers of the journal are now all but unobtainable, yet the papers they contain hold extremely valuable historical information not available elsewhere [1]. The reprint volume also includes contributions by Hughes-Hallett, Amin Sweeney, Black, P. M. Shariffuddin, Abdul Latif Hj Ibrahim, and Tun Suffian, with a foreword by the historian Professor Cheah Boon Kheng [1].

The royal genealogies compiled by Low and Treacher document the dynastic succession of the Brunei rajas, providing the foundational framework for understanding the sultanate’s political continuity. The Selesilah, as a book of genealogical descent, represents a traditional Malay form of historical record that traces legitimacy through patrilineal succession, while Treacher’s genealogy offers a complementary scholarly reconstruction [1]. Together, these works establish the royal lineage that governed Brunei from its emergence as a maritime power through the colonial period and into the modern era.

Colonial Encounters and Territorial Administration

The period immediately following the 1870 treaty between the White Rajah’s Sarawak and the Sultanate of Brunei produced significant administrative friction along the north-west Borneo coast, as documented in N. Denison’s journal of a twenty-six-day voyage in May 1872 from the Sarawak settlement at Oya through the Brunei-claimed Meri and Baram rivers to Sibu and Kuching [2]. Denison, a European resident in Sarawak with direct commercial and administrative connections to the Oya Trading Company and the Borneo Company, observed both systems of governance from the Sarawak side [2].

The central tension Denison records is the encroachment of Chinese traders, many of them Sarawak-based, into the Baram river system, where they were paying Kayan headhunters $40 per pikul (a unit of weight) for gutta, undercutting the established Brunei Malay middlemen who had long monopolised the trade between the interior Kayans and the coast [2]. A pointed exchange between Denison’s companion and Brunei traders (Awang Badan and Tuan Panjano) reveals the mutual accusations that characterised the period: the Brunei side accused Sarawak of heavy fines, while the Sarawak side countered with a specific case of Pangeran Anak Chuchu levying twenty pikuls of gums (worth $2,400 in gutta) on the Panglima Baling’s village, carrying away plunder estimated at $9,000 [2, pp. 177–178].

The Meri district, including Sibuti, Nyah, and Suai, had a combined population of roughly 2,000, with territorial claims divided between Pangeran Anak Chuchu (87 doors) and Pangeran Mohamed Alam (107 doors); the latter extracted eighty catties per annum per man from the village of Luak [2, pp. 176–177]. The Baram river population was estimated at approximately 30,000 under four or five independent chiefs, with the upper-river Kayan chief Prang Nibut commanding about 5,000 fighting men [2, p. 177]. These figures illustrate the layered political geography of the region, where Brunei’s nominal suzerainty coexisted with the practical autonomy of interior chiefs and the commercial ambitions of external traders.

Economic Life and Ethnographic Observation

The Baram trade in birds’ nests was estimated at fifty pikuls per annum, valued at $10,000 ($200 per pikul); Brunei traders’ profits on Baram trade had fallen from 400 per cent to 100 per cent due to Chinese competition, while borrowing costs at Brunei ran at 2–3 per cent per month [2, pp. 178–179]. The sago industry at Oya received a technical description in Denison’s journal: the Oya Trading Company’s 14-horsepower engine-driven mill processed tree trunks thirty to forty feet long, sold at thirty cents per three-foot cut (krat), yielding roughly half a pasu (a measure of volume) of sago per cut [2, p. 185].

Denison’s journal also serves as a detailed ethnographic record, much of it drawn from the Resident at Muka and the Resident at Oya. He reproduces at length their accounts of Milano religious practice, including belief in a single Supreme Being called “Allah taala,” propitiation of hantus (spirits), and sorcery practised chiefly by women [2, pp. 181–184]. The persistence of head-hunting and the consumption of raw hearts among Dayak and Milano warriors, human sacrifice among the Milanos prior to the Brooke cession, and the contrasting customs of the Muruts and Dusuns of northern Borneo are all documented [2, pp. 181–184]. A brief military episode closes the journal: the bala (expedition) against the up-river Dayak chief Andam on the Mujok, which resulted in one enemy killed, several wounded, two Sarawak men killed, and the destruction of Dayak houses at Intiman, with the population ordered to relocate to Entabai [2, p. 187].

The Modern Novel and National Ideology

The development of the modern Malay novel in Brunei Darussalam has been shaped by the country’s distinctive political trajectory: a long period of British protection, the 1962 rebellion, near-total cultural isolation from Indonesia following the repatriation of Indonesian teachers in 1967, and the post-independence promotion of MIB as a unifying national creed [3]. The MIB ideology was first publicly articulated in Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah’s independence speech in 1984 and has been propagated as a traditional rather than novel concept [3, p. 44]. Bruneian students in Malaysia were recalled in 1972, compounding the period of cultural isolation [3, p. 44].

The early production of the Bruneian novel was remarkably sparse: two works in the early 1950s, then a gap of more than a decade [3]. The first, Mahkota Yang Berdarah by Yura Halim (1951), was substantially censored by British Special Branch; the second, Tunangan Pemimpin Bangsa by H. M. Salleh (1952), was written in detention and smuggled to Singapore for publication [3, pp. 44–45]. By 1980 only three Bruneian novels had been published; by 1991 the number had risen to thirty-six, though some remained unpublished [3, pp. 45–46]. The subsequent flowering in the 1980s was driven by the restoration of ties with Malaysia, the opening of Universiti Brunei Darussalam, and the recruitment of Malaysian novelists to the Brunei Language and Literature Bureau [3].

C. H. Gallop’s 2004 analysis identifies Muslim Burmat as the most prolific Bruneian novelist, whose six novels (1982–1999) consistently focus on dispossessed and marginalised figures — fishermen, farmers, estate workers — and whose treatment of British characters in Terbenamnya Matahari departs sharply from the adversarial stereotypes typical of Bruneian fiction [3, pp. 46–48]. Burmat published his culminating work, the 800-page Urih Pesisir, in 1999, and received the SEA Write Award in Bangkok in 1986 [3, pp. 46–48]. Gallop proposes that Burmat’s Kedayan ethnicity, a non-dominant identity within Brunei’s Brunei Malay majority, grants him a “lateral” vantage point that enables both social compassion and a degree of cultural objectivity unavailable to writers embedded in the mainstream [3]. Deploying Louis Althusser’s distinction between repressive and ideological state apparatuses, Gallop explains the gap between Burmat’s actual writing and the way Bruneian critics receive it: local commentators read the deaths of non-Muslim characters as evidence of the author’s “patriotism” and even his hatred of Westerners, while the MIB ideology, operating through consensus rather than coercion, produces a reading climate in which certain interpretations appear natural and freely chosen but are in fact induced by the ideological apparatus [3].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s engagement with Brunei spans more than a century, from the ethnographic and colonial-administrative reporting of the 1870s and 1880s to the literary-critical analysis of the early twenty-first century. Denison’s journal, published a full decade after the events it describes, was offered as a contribution to the Society’s growing corpus of Borneo ethnography and colonial history rather than as a contemporary dispatch [2]. The 1998 reprint volume represents a deliberate institutional effort to recover and preserve material that had become all but unobtainable, addressing what its editors identified as a significant gap in the scholarly literature on Brunei’s early history [1]. The shift from the genealogical and trade-focused concerns of the Straits Branch era to the ideological and literary analysis of the modern period reflects broader changes in the Society’s research priorities, moving from the documentation of colonial administration and indigenous customs towards the examination of national identity, cultural production, and the politics of representation in post-independence Brunei [3].

Antiquities

MBRAS Sources

History

Antiquities

Description and travel

Kings and rulers

References

  1. Hugh Low et al. (1998). Papers Relating to Brunei : 192.
  2. N. Denison (1882). Journal (from 29th April to 25th May, 1872) when on a trip from Sarawak to Meri, on the north-west coast of Borneo in the Brunei territory JSBRAS 10: 173–188.
  3. C.H. Gallop (2004). Brunei Darussalam and the modern novel JMBRAS 77(1): 43–52. Read on JSTOR