Rajah Brooke and the ‘pirates’ of Borneo: A nineteenth century public debate on sea power

Abstract

In 1839, Sir James Brooke reached Sarawak, Borneo, in his private yacht, later to be granted the territory as his own by the Sultan of Brunei. As Rajah, Brooke embarked on a campaign to suppress Bornean 'pirates,' comprising initially the Iban of the Saribas and Skrang rivers, and later the princes of Brunei and other non-Iban raiders from further north. Over a decade, Brooke and the Royal Navy jointly suppressed such piracy, to the general satisfaction of the Foreign Office, although the latter remained resolutely disinterested in Brooke's hopes to cede Sarawak to Britain.

Brooke's appointment to public office in 1847 as Governor of Labuan, however, proved a turning point in his relationship with the Royal Navy. It was followed by Parliamentary criticism of Brooke's appointment and then his activities in Borneo, especially by free trade radicals Joseph Hume and Richard Cobden, culminating in a public Commission of Inquiry and the withdrawal of Naval support to Brooke. However, the Navy continued its own efforts to suppress Bornean piracy into the 1870s.

A maritime-focussed study of this historical period reveals that Brooke's success in gaining Naval support, and then his loss of it, relied on law as a legitimising rhetoric supporting Seldenian dominion over the regional seas. The thesis concludes that the key to understanding the change in support is the way Brooke's narrative converted his apparently private interests in Sarawak's stability to a public interest in controlling regional access to the seas in an essentially maritime zone, by excluding unlawful pirates. When Brooke was appointed to publicly-funded office, the risk of legal conflict between his private interests and his public duties crystallised, and began to disrupt the narrative.

Understanding the manner in which this public/private dichotomy, expressed in legal terms and in a maritime context, developed for Brooke is a new perspective on the early period of his rule. It also reveals a complex picture of the interrelationship of sea power, law and government during this episode of the Pax Britannica, and offers an opportunity to reflect on the applicability of classic Mahanian sea power thinking in certain circumstances beyond those emphasised by Mahan.