Looking back on the “Sulu Zone”: state formation, slave raiding and ethnic diversity in Southeast Asia
James Francis Warren published this retrospective in 1996, looking back on his monograph The Sulu Zone 1768–1898 to articulate the theoretical and methodological framework underpinning his reinterpretation of the Sulu Sultanate as a maritime trading state whose expansion was driven by slave raiding and cross-cultural commerce rather than by the decline or barbarism that earlier historiography had assumed. The article situates the Sulu Sultanate within a borderless “Zone” of economic influence stretching between China, Singapore, and the eastern Indonesian archipelago, and argues that the institution of slavery and the process of ethnic formation were mutually reinforcing pillars of state-building in the region.
Summary
Warren frames the article as a personal and intellectual retrospective, tracing the arc from his Peace Corps posting in Semporna, Sabah (1967–69), where he lived among the Samal Bajau Laut and witnessed the rapid extinction of their sea-nomadic way of life, through his early attempts to write a balanced history of a marginalised non-western people using only British colonial records, to the mature theoretical architecture of The Sulu Zone. The central historiographical problem he identifies is the dominance of a Eurocentric, insular perspective that treated the maritime populations of the Sulu Sea—Taosug, Balangingi Samal, Samal Bajau Laut, Iranun, and Magindanao—as caricatures of piracy and decay, rather than as participants in a dynamic regional political economy. Drawing on Braudel’s concept of the “Mediterranean” as a zone and on E.R. Leach’s work on highland Burma, Warren proposes a borderless, process-oriented framework that replaces fixed geographic boundaries with the larger-scale processes of trade, raiding, and structural change.
The core argument is that slave raiding was not a symptom of the economic decline of Malayo-Muslim maritime states but was integral to their formation and expansion. As the Sulu Sultanate grew in the second half of the eighteenth century, the ruling elite needed to enforce their monopoly of redistribution through the port of Jolo and to secure the labour-intensive production of marine and forest products—particularly tripang (sea cucumber) and mother-of-pearl shell—destined for Chinese markets. Raiding supplied the necessary labour and simultaneously enforced the Sultanate’s control over regional trade. Crucially, Warren demonstrates that the Balangingi Samal, the group most infamously associated with Sulu’s slave-raiding reputation, did not exist as a distinct ethnic entity before the early nineteenth century; they were an “emergent society” composed largely of Filipino captives and their descendants who had been incorporated into the Sulu Zone and, within a single generation, became the predators of their own former compatriots. This finding reframes the question of ethnicity in insular Southeast Asia as a process of “accomplishment” rather than a fixed premise.
Warren also addresses the methodological innovation of using over one hundred and eighty fugitive slave testimonies—suppressed voices from the past—as ethnohistorical sources that reveal the “inside” experience of slavery in ways that colonial records cannot. These accounts, drawn from Spanish, American, Dutch, and British archives, allow the reconstitution of patterns of social life, economic activity, and ethnic transformation from the perspective of the enslaved themselves. The article further distinguishes between “closed” slave systems (found in mainland kingdoms such as Angkor, Pagan, and Ayutthaya, where ethnicity was not a critical integrating concept) and “open” systems like Sulu, where slavery and ethnicity became mutually reinforcing and virtually the basis of organised society.
Key Findings
- The Balangingi Samal did not exist as a distinct ethnic group before the beginning of the nineteenth century; by the 1830s they had become a group “renowned and feared throughout Southeast Asia” for their slave-raiding activities (p. 30).
- Over one hundred and eighty fugitive slave accounts, drawn from Spanish, American, Dutch, and British manuscript sources, were used to reconstruct the internal experience of slavery in the Sulu Zone (p. 27).
- The main slave raiding zones in the South China Sea and the waters of Eastern Indonesia and the Philippines attracted sustained naval pressure from Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands for more than a quarter of a century; by the 1880s the number of slaves moving across the region had been reduced to a trickle (p. 30).
- The decisive battle of Balangingi in 1848 triggered a diaspora spanning four generations of exiles, documented in Margarita de los Reyes Cojuangco’s biographical work on the Samal leader Panglina Taupan (p. 30, n. 15).
- The North Borneo Chartered Company’s administration (1878–1909) presided over the emergence of a new social and political order that profoundly affected the Taosug, the Chinese, and especially the Samal Bajau Laut, whose maritime nomadic culture was being extinguished by political and economic development (p. 21).
- In “open” slave systems such as Sulu, slavery and ethnicity became mutually reinforcing; in “closed” systems (Angkor, Pagan, Ayutthaya, Toba Batak, Kenyah, Toraja), ethnicity was not a critical integrating concept in the enslavement process (p. 29).
Conclusion
Warren’s definitive takeaway is that the Sulu Sultanate’s history cannot be understood through the bounded, organic-society model inherited from traditional anthropology and colonial historiography. The Zone was a fluid, permeable space in which cross-cultural trade, slave raiding, and the accomplishment of ethnicity were the very mechanisms of state formation and social transformation. The abolition of the slave trade in the 1880s dealt a mortal blow to the Sulu economy, forcing a shift toward debt bondage and increased tribute extraction, and ultimately demonstrating that the political economy of the Sultanate was inseparable from the global circuits of trade and the pressures of colonial naval power.
Context
- The article draws on archival collections in Spain, the United States, the Philippines, the Netherlands, and England, as well as ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Warren in Sabah during the 1960s and 1970s.
- Historiographically, the piece positions The Sulu Zone as a corrective to the Eurocentric “piracy” narrative dominant in Spanish, Dutch, and British colonial literature, and aligns the study with the broader turn toward world-systems analysis, ethnohistory, and the de-centering of colonial perspectives in Southeast Asian historiography.