RAJA JAMES BROOKE AND SARAWAK: AN ANOMALY IN THE 19TH CENTURY BRITISH COLONIAL SCENE
LEIGH R. WRIGHT*
(The text of a lecture given to the Branch on 18th January 1972)
To the reading public a hundred years ago the name of Raja James Brooke and his oriental kingdom of Sarawak, then a medium-sized principality on the northwest coast of Borneo, conjured up visions of dark impenetrable jungles; tropical rivers and mangrove coasts infested with the fiercest and most barbaric of pirates; and a pagan headhunting primitive people, ruled over by a Malay sultan and a court of Malay chiefs who had over long years of decline and corruption been reduced to only slightly more respectable status than the pirates. Brooke was usually presented in a highly romantic light—the best type of British export, the humanitarian colonial who helped penetrate the barbaric darkness of remote Borneo and who was holding the thin precarious line of civilization. Joseph Conrad and later, Somerset Maugham, added to the romance and colour surrounding the Borneo and Malay world of which Brooke was an important part.
Much that went to make up this mental picture of Borneo in the English reading world was fact. There were pirates aplenty. The Sultanate of Brunei had declined to a low state of impotence and corruption, Brunei was by the nineteenth century one of those decaying Moslem states of the Malay world about which the historian Lennox Mills wrote,
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The rule of the Malays was as weak as it was cruel and oppressive; individually brave, they were unable to prevent their state from crumbling to pieces before their eyes. The Malay nobles appear to have divided their time between intrigue and dissipation at Brunei Town, and the oppression of their Dayak subjects.
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Many of the Dayaks were indeed the fierce headhunters that were depicted in the nineteenth century accounts. And James Brooke
* Dr. Wright is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of The Origins of British Borneo, Hong Kong University Press, 1970.
1 L. A. Mills, British Malaya 1824-67, (Singapore 1925), p. 284.