Two Colonial Office memoranda on the history of Brunei. R.E. Stubbs. .E. Brown
Sir Reginald Edward Stubbs, writing as chief clerk of the Colonial Office in 1905 and again in 1911 after a special mission to Malaya, produced two memoranda that together constitute the most detailed contemporary British administrative account of Brunei’s reduction from a major Bornean sultanate to a small protected enclave and the establishment of a British Resident there. Edited and annotated by D. E. Brown and published in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1968, the memoranda argue that the Limbang crisis of the 1880s and 1890s was the pivotal event that ultimately compelled London to abandon its long-standing policy of allowing Brunei to be carved up between Sarawak and the British North Borneo Company in favour of direct protection.
Summary
The first memorandum traces the Limbang dispute from the 1884 revolt through Sarawak’s forcible annexation of the district in March 1890. Stubbs reconstructs the complex interplay of Brunei court factions—the aging Sultan Abdul Mumin, the ambitious Temenggong (later Sultan Hashim), the rival Pengiran Di-Gadong, and the mediating Pengiran Bendahara—against the backdrop of Sarawak’s expansion under Rajah Brooke and the British North Borneo Company’s competing territorial ambitions. The narrative reveals how repeated British attempts to mediate a cession of the Limbang to Sarawak were frustrated by the Sultan’s obstinate refusal, the “Umana” document of 1885 binding the Sultan and chiefs not to cede further territory, and the genuine popular resistance of the Limbang’s Bisaya and Kedayan inhabitants. When Rajah Brooke simply seized the district by force in 1890, the British government ratified the occupation but fixed compensation at $6,000 per year—a sum the Sultan refused to accept, and which was returned to Sarawak in 1895.
The second memorandum picks up in 1905, when the Colonial Office finally concluded that the only viable course was to establish a Protectorate on the Federated Malay States model. Stubbs candidly admits there was no financial justification for the £20,000 advance from the FMS to redeem Brunei’s mortgaged revenues, but argues that Treasury control would have been worse. The 1906 Treaty installed a Resident, promised the Sultan a fixed income of $12,000 per year, and placed Brunei’s foreign relations under British control. The subsequent five years were consumed by the arduous task of buying out or cancelling the innumerable monopolies and concessions that had mortgaged the state’s revenues, a process that drove the FMS loan to $300,000 by 1909. Stubbs also documents the ongoing friction with Sarawak over the Muara coal concessions and Rajah Brooke’s persistent, ultimately futile, campaign to have Brunei absorbed into his territory.
The memoranda’s particular value lies in their Brunei-centred perspective and in their frank exposure of how shifts in British administrative attitudes—driven largely by on-the-spot investigations by Straits Settlements and FMS officers free of the anti-Brunei sentiments prevalent among Sarawak and North Borneo officials—produced the policy reversal that saved the sultanate from complete absorption.
Key Findings
- The Limbang revolt of 1884 was triggered by over-taxation, feudal “aids,” forced trade, and harem recruitment by Brunei pengirans; the Temenggong’s failed punitive expedition in September 1884 and his subsequent cession of the Trusan district to Sarawak for $4,500 per year (December 1884) set the stage for further territorial loss (pp. 88–91).
- Rajah Brooke forcibly annexed the Limbang on 17 March 1890; the British government ratified the seizure but fixed compensation at $6,000 per year (March 1892), which the Sultan refused to claim and which was repaid to Sarawak in 1895 (pp. 100–102).
- The 1906 Protectorate Treaty, signed by the Sultan on 5 December 1905 and by Sir J. Anderson on 2 January 1906, guaranteed the Sultan $12,000 per year and the Pengirans Bendahara and Pemancha $6,000 each, with all previously mortgaged revenues reverting to the state (pp. 107–108).
- The Federated Malay States advanced £20,000 in 1905 to redeem Brunei’s mortgaged revenues; by 1909 the total loan had reached $300,000 at 4% interest, most of it spent buying out concessions (pp. 105, 109–110).
- Mr. Cowie sold his Muara Damit coal-mining and farm rights to Rajah Brooke in 1888 for £25,000 (having originally acquired the farm rights for approximately £800); the resulting concessions gave Sarawak effective control over the Muara districts and blocked coal development on the upper Brunei River (pp. 113–116).
- The British government proposed but ultimately did not enforce an export tax of 25 cents per ton on coal exported from Brooketon, conceding the point to avoid shutting down the mines and eliminating Brunei’s principal source of employment (pp. 114–115).
Conclusion
Stubbs’s definitive historical takeaway is that the Limbang affair, by provoking the Sultan’s intransigence and demonstrating the futility of piecemeal cession, paradoxically preserved Brunei: had the Sultan not been so wounded by Sarawak’s high-handed seizure, he would long since have accepted a pension and handed over his remaining territory, and the sultanate would have ceased to exist. The Protectorate was thus less a deliberate act of British benevolence than an unintended consequence of Sarawak’s own aggression.
Context
- The memoranda draw on complete access to Colonial Office files (C.O. 531/3, now at The National Archives, London) and on Stubbs’s first-hand acquaintance with several of the actors, including Sir J. Anderson and Mr. McArthur.
- Brown’s editorial contribution is primarily historiographical: by centring the narrative on Brunei rather than on Sarawak, North Borneo, or London, the publication corrects what he identifies as a persistent gap in the literature on British Borneo, where Brunei has typically received only sketchy treatment from the perspective of the more powerful neighbouring entities.