Empire by Treaty.

In 1857, as Labuan was adjusting herself to being the only British colony in Borneo—Sarawak was not a “colony” in the official meaning of the word—the Indians at India rose to fight against the rule of the British East India Company (EIC), which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. It was later famously (or infamously, if one was pro-colonialism) known as The Sepoy Rebellion. At its peak the company—an English, and later British joint-stock company— was the largest corporation in the world and had an army that was twice the size of the British army at the time.

Closer to home, North Borneo found herself officially ruled by the British when the London-registered British North Borneo Provisional Association Limited was founded in 1881, and a year later, the company was granted a Royal Charter. Old Sabah was destined to become the last country in the world to be ruled by a chartered company.

When I posted a picture of Sultan Muhammad Jamalul Alam, Sultan Sulu, who sold Sabah to Baron Gustavus von Overbeck dan Alfred Dent in 1878 last month, many commented and argued that the Sultan had no ownership, control or dominion over old Sabah, and so, how could he sign us away?

I think a more interesting and pertinent, and ultimately significant question was why were van Overbeck and Alfred Dent perfectly happy to sign the treaty concession with the little, backward and improvised Sultan of Sulu? In truth, they could have signed it with someone else if they had found a “ruler” of some note in mainland Sabah, or at least those areas (East Coast) where Brunei’s control were weakest. That was the European colonist’s play book—one that maybe called “Empire by Treaty.”

That was how EIC gained and controlled large swathes of old India. From the middle of the eighteenth century the British in India used many treaties (many signed under the gun) with South Asian rulers to give legal form and sanction to their growing military and territorial power. EIC were willing to sign treaties with every Taneesh, Dhishan and Hari (“Tom, Dick and Harry”) regional and provincial rulers, big or small, where they found them, for they knew, and they planned that they would take over completely.

And so was what that happened in Sabah. Whether “pajak” means rent or complete sale, the Sulus were never going to get back what they think (or claim) as theirs.

Picture:
A painting by Edward Armitage depicting the Battle of Miani, 1843. (Miani, today is in Pakistan).

Suggested reading:

A British Empire by Treaty in Eighteenth-Century India by Robert Travers, in Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600-1900 (Saliha Belmessous (ed.)). Published: 27 November 2014.

Crocker Range and Microclimate

Mt. Kinabalu, the summit of the Crocker Range.

In the early 1960s, as a child I travelled the Ranau-Jesselton road, and the Penampang-Tambunan-Keningau road in the late 1960s, that traverse the Crocker Range. As the oldies in this group can attest, those were newly built roads then, still mostly just red earth routes with only a few sections laid with river stone gravel.

Now what has changed today are the roads are much better, but we have lost something too: the microclimate afforded by the much thicker growths and extensive coverage of virgin forests.

Travelling across the Crocker Range felt much cooler then because it was colder: rain clouds and mists extended far lower towards the plains. Kundasang was misty and so too was Sunsuron in Tambunan. Even Ranau town, as was Tambunan town, was shrouded in morning mists on most days, at least until the sun was higher—one could barely see the old Liwagu bridge near Ranau town while crossing it in the morning.

Easter Island, Chile in the far South Pacific has a few trees now, but researchers, having done many pollen studies, showed that it was heavily forested at one time. So why were the old Easter Islanders such idiots to even want to cut down the last groove of trees (probably used to transport and erect the last of the giant stone heads—chieftains’ vanity projects, these seem to be)?

It was a case of “creeping normality,” the example above being shown by Pulitzer Prize winner and author, Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005). It is a process by which a major change can be accepted as normal and acceptable if it happens slowly through small, often unnoticeable, increments of change. People tend to think only within the span (and experience) of their lifetimes—call it a species of “recency bias,” if you will.

I wonder if one day the temperate vegetables of Kundasang will refuse to grow because of deforestation and climate change.

The summit of the Crocker Range in 2024.
Picture owner:
Published here with the kind permission of Ankol Tom
https://www.facebook.com/ankoltom

An old shell game.

Hey oldies, remember this?
The gomen regulated many of our little fun away. In the 1960s, from CNY to Chap Goh Mei, people were “allowed” (gomen looked the other way) to congregate for a casino. Just some dudes operating gaming tables, including Tombola, and everyone could just walk in.

My favourite was the “bet how many remaining seashells left” game. Take a bunch of small seashells. Put them inside the porcelain cup—the cup will be faced down with the shells underneath on the gaming table—and before opening and counting, punters will bet on a single digit number.

The croupier will divide the bunch in groups of tens, and the winning number is the extra. To make the appearance that everything was above-board, a punter will be asked to take the bunch of shells in play from a gunny bag. Knowing casinos, the payout will be less than the real odds.

The “shells” were actually a (present-day) 5-cent size of these (operculum of a snail):

Book: Exploration of Mount Kina Balu, North Borneo.

Some of the beautiful drawings in the book, “Exploration of Mount Kina Balu, North Borneo,” by John Whitehead (First European to actually summit Mount Kinabalu.) Publisher: London : Gurney and Jackson, 1893.

Full book online here.