North Borneo as an integral part of the
historic Sultanate of Sulu.
Traced through royal genealogies, territorial grants and diplomatic agreements.
Sulu was a sultanate centred on Jolo, in the islands between Mindanao and Borneo.
Its rulers governed through local chiefs, family ties and maritime commerce. Across the water lay North Borneo: the northern part of the island of Borneo, with coastal communities tied to the Sultan at Jolo.
The historical case concerns that northern and northeastern coast—territory within present-day Sabah.
Geography and institutions · Saleeby, chapters I–III ↗
Sulu’s royal genealogies trace its ruling dynasty to Abu Bakr in the fifteenth century. Successive sultans inherited royal authority, supported by datus—the local chiefs—and the communities owing them allegiance. Jolo was the centre of this maritime realm, whose political relationships extended across the surrounding islands and coasts.
Royal origins and institutions · Saleeby, pp. 161–164 ↗Sulu’s account traces its North Borneo possessions to a grant from the neighbouring Sultanate of Brunei, traditionally dated around 1704, following assistance in a civil war. The British hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple recorded that date in 1774. The coast became part of the territorial inheritance claimed by successive Sulu rulers.
Willi, 1922 · p. 40 ↗Datus connected northeast Borneo’s river settlements to Jolo through kinship, marriage, allegiance and trade. Local produce entered a wider maritime economy linking Sulu to regional and overseas markets. Historian James Warren traces how these relationships sustained Sulu’s authority along the coast: commerce operated within an existing political order.
Warren, 1979 · pp. 226–228 ↗British traders entered this existing maritime network. In 1761, the Sultan concluded a treaty with the East India Company, the British enterprise trading across Asia. It sought a base at Balambangan, off northern Borneo, to draw regional produce into the China trade and sell Indian goods. Access to these waters brought its representatives to the Sultan as a treaty-making ruler.
Treacher, British Borneo · pp. 4–5 ↗A different enterprise followed in the nineteenth century. Alfred Dent, a British merchant, and Baron von Overbeck obtained grants from the rulers of Brunei and Sulu in 1877–1878. Their venture became the British North Borneo Company, chartered in 1881 to administer and develop the territory. The 1878 instruments below show how the Sultan conferred rights and governing powers on its founders.
Treacher, British Borneo · pp. 92–103 ↗
22 January 1878
The newcomers obtained their authority from the Sultan. On the same day, he issued a territorial grant and a commission to govern. Read together, they explain both the Company’s beginnings and the Sulu case for rights that survived it.
Sultan Jamalul Alam granted Overbeck and Dent rights over a defined coast in return for an annual payment. The translation attributed to Harold Conklin calls it a “permanent lease”. On that reading, the Sultan granted use of the territory while retaining title, with payment owed to him and his successors.
The grant and Conklin’s translation ↗A separate instrument appointed Overbeck Datu Bandahara and Raja of Sandakan, empowering him to make laws, levy taxes and govern. The Sultan expressly described those powers as his to delegate:
“which we hereby delegate to him of our own free and sovereign will”The commission · Saleeby, p. 226 ↗
In 1946, the British Crown took over from the Company. The Sulu claim outlived that transfer: the Sultan’s heirs maintained their rights, and the Philippines took their case into state diplomacy.The 1946 transfer ↗
“would not prejudice either the claim or any right thereunder”
1962
In 1962, the Philippines took up a claim derived from Sulu’s sovereign rights. The heirs’ position was that North Borneo had been leased, with title retained.
Read the record ↗1963–1966
The 1963 Manila Accord expressly preserved the claim and any rights under it. Malaysia and the Philippines reaffirmed that framework in 1966.
Read the record ↗1966 reaffirmation ↗2011
In 2011, the Philippine Supreme Court confirmed that the statutory Sabah reservation remained in force. This preserved the domestic claim; it did not adjudicate international sovereignty.
Read the record ↗North Borneo’s relationship with Sulu was territorial, political and cultural. Colonial administration changed who governed; it did not erase that history or end the assertion of Sulu-derived rights.
15 records to explore
Original manuscripts, treaties and correspondence: follow the record from the Sultanate to the continuing claim.
The National Archives, Kew · reproduction via Wikimedia Commons
The Sultan grants rights over a defined Borneo coast in return for an annual payment to himself and his heirs. This is the surviving Jawi text behind the lease translations.
Saleeby, Diagram I · Sultans and royal datus
Traces the dynasty and the succession of Sulu’s royal authority.
Saleeby’s map of the Sulu Archipelago
Locates the maritime connections between Jolo, Mindanao and northeast Borneo.
Translation attributed to Harold Conklin · Reagan Library enclosure
Renders the grant as a permanent lease with annual payment to the Sultan and his successors.
Agreement opening page · Reagan Library enclosure
Traces the Company’s claimed rights back to the earlier grants as British Crown rule begins.
Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Brunei · Wikimedia Commons
The Sultan appoints a ruler and delegates governmental powers through his own authority, in a commission separate from the territorial agreement.
Willi · Internet Archive
The treaty places British commercial access within an existing Sulu political order more than a century before the North Borneo Company.
Sabah State Attorney-General’s Chambers
The English copy uses cession terminology and records the Company returning to the Sultan to formalise the islands’ status, with an additional annual payment of 300 dollars.
Sabah State Attorney-General’s Chambers
Its recitals trace the Company’s rights to grants from the rulers of Sulu and Brunei: the corporate enterprise followed their authority.
Sabah State Attorney-General’s Chambers
Article III places Sulu’s Borneo possessions expressly in the diplomatic record. The agreement was between European powers and must be read in that colonial context.
Sabah State Attorney-General’s Chambers
The record explains the next stage of colonial government and the chain of instruments on which the Company relied. It asserts Company sovereignty, rather than affirming the Sulu lease interpretation.
Sabah State Attorney-General’s Chambers
Read beside the Jawi text and the lease translations, it identifies precisely where the English renderings differ.
Willi, The Early Relations of England with Borneo, p. 40
Records Dalrymple’s account of the earlier grant, placing Sulu’s territorial history before British company rule.
Commission reprinted in Saleeby, 1908, p. 226
Identifies the Sultan as the authority delegating powers of government to Overbeck.
Manila Accord, paragraph 12 · UN Treaty Series
Expressly preserves the Philippine claim and any rights under it when North Borneo enters Malaysia.
Before the Company. Before the Charter. There was the Sultan of Sulu.
The Sultanate of Sulu was not a kingdom of fences and fixed borders. It was a realm of water and allegiance.
Tausug, Sama, Yakan and others spoke different languages and lived different lives. Islam, trade and loyalty bound them to the Sultan at Jolo, to his datus, and to the council of nobles called the Ruma Bichara.
At its height, that allegiance reached from the Sulu islands to Basilan and southern Palawan, and across the sea to the northeast coast of Borneo.
For three centuries, Spain tried to break it. Jolo was attacked, burned and occupied. The Sultanate endured.
Sulu tradition holds that northeast Borneo came to the Sultanate around 1704, a reward from Brunei for Sulu’s help in a civil war. Brunei’s chroniclers dispute it. But long before the British Company arrived, Sulu’s title was on the record. In 1774, the British hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple dated the grant to 1704.
Along that coast, at Marudu Bay, at Sandakan, on the Kinabatangan, Tausug datus tied to Jolo by kinship and allegiance controlled the trade. Birds’ nests, pearls, camphor and sea cucumber moved through Sulu hands to Chinese junks. Historian James Warren maps this world in The Sulu Zone.
When Britain first wanted northern Borneo, it went to Jolo.
In 1761, Dalrymple signed a treaty with the Sultan of Sulu for the East India Company, ratified by Sulu’s nobles. In 1762, the Sultan granted the Company the island of Balambangan. By the end of 1763, the grant included northern Borneo itself. That is recorded by William Treacher, the first Governor of British North Borneo.
Spain protested. Its argument was that it held authority over Sulu, and through Sulu, over the Sultan’s dependencies in Borneo.
Britain and Spain disagreed about almost everything in these waters. Yet both treated northern Borneo as territory within the Sultan of Sulu’s domain.
A century later, the British came back. Again, they came to the Sultan.
On 22 January 1878, Sultan Jamalul Alam granted Alfred Dent and Baron von Overbeck rights over the coast from the Pandassan River to the Sibuku.
Then the Sultan acted as a sovereign. He appointed Overbeck to office as Datu Bendahara and Rajah of Sandakan, with power to make laws, levy taxes and raise armed forces. Every one of those powers was delegated from the Sultan’s own authority.
A European businessman governed Sandakan under a title and powers conferred by the Sultan of Sulu.
Weeks earlier, the Sultan of Brunei had issued grants over overlapping land. The Company did not choose between them. It paid both.
The grant turned on one word: padajak.
The British English translation says the land was ceded. In Sulu’s reading, padajak meant lease: the use of the land in return for a yearly payment, with the land itself never sold.
The annual payment arrangement outlived the Sultan. His heirs received it. When the Crown took over North Borneo after the Second World War, Britain paid. When Malaysia was formed in 1963, Malaysia paid.
From 1878 until payments stopped in 2013, the arrangement linked North Borneo to the Sultan of Sulu and his heirs.
In 1881, Britain chartered the British North Borneo Company. The next year, Foreign Secretary Earl Granville told the House of Lords that the charter gave the Crown no sovereignty. The territory, he said, remains under the suzerainty of the Sultan.
The story did not end with the Company.
In 1946, Britain made North Borneo a Crown colony. The Sultan's heirs continued to maintain that the land had been leased, and that their rights survived the transfer.
In 1962, the Philippines took up a claim derived from the Sultanate's sovereign rights. The next year, the Manila Accord expressly preserved that claim and any rights under it when North Borneo entered Malaysia. Malaysia and the Philippines reaffirmed the Accord in 1966.
In 2011, the Philippine Supreme Court confirmed that the country's statutory claim to Sabah remained in force. It did not decide international sovereignty. But it documented something essential: the claim had not disappeared.
Colonial governments changed who administered the land. They did not erase the Sultanate's place in its history, or end the assertion of rights inherited from Sulu.
From the Sultan's court at Jolo to the river settlements of North Borneo, this was a history of people, allegiance and inherited authority.
Its record survives in royal genealogies, the original Jawi agreement, the Sultan's commission, and the diplomatic agreements that followed.
A history of belonging. A claim carried forward.
The North Borneo Papers. History lives in evidence.