RAJA JAMES BROOKE AND SARAWAK
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the "local authorities" rather than from the sovereign prince of Sarawak, as was usual. Thus the anomalous status of Sarawak in the view of some officials remained, and this technicality provided an opportunity for a subsequent permanent undersecretary in the Foreign Office to declare that Brooke had not been recognized as a reigning prince. Julian Pauncefote opined in 1877,19
Raja Brooke has not forfeited his claims of British nationality by accepting the position of ruler of Sarawak and as a matter of constitutional law it is competent to Her Majesty to recognize him as a sovereign prince but no such recognition has yet taken place.
James Brooke died in 1868, happy at having received his country's recognition, and confident that it was merely a step toward the desired British protectorate. In this he was prophetic. Although a formal protectorate was not granted until 1888, Britain made it quite clear by a pronouncement late in 1868 that her paramount interests on the northwest coast of Borneo constituted it a British sphere.20
Raja James Brooke was presented at court on two occasions, in 1847, and again in 1857. His nephew and successor, Charles Brooke, visited England in 1869 and asked to be received officially. He was told that he might write on his card and be presented as "Mr. Brooke, Raja of Sarawak". The second white raja was incensed and refused to appear until finally, in 1874, he was presented as "His Highness, the Raja of Sarawak”, and granted a place just below the Indian maharajas in the order of precedence at Court.
Until 1888, Britain's empire building in Borneo was done largely by proxy, by Englishmen indeed, but by the agency of political structures and vehicles outside the direct control of Whitehall. That was the role of the Brooke raj, and later of the chartered company that ruled North Borneo, so far as they were a part of the British empire. One of Brooke's friends, John Abel Smith, M.P., was quite accurate when in 1866 he noted rather sourly,21
The English government is quite alive to the importance of Sarawak to British interests, but as long as Raja Brooke
19 Pauncefote minute, 2 January 1877, FO12/43.
20 FO to Hennessy, 2 December 1868, FO12/34A.
21 Owen Rutter (ed) Rajah Brooke and Baroness Burdett-Coutts, London, 1935, p. 272.
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