North Borneo
and the
Sultanate of Sulu

Before the Company

Before the Company. Before the Charter. There was the Sultan of Sulu.

Many peoples, one allegiance

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.

The Sultan’s coast

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.

Europe comes to the Sultan

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.

The Sultan’s grant

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.

Padajak

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.

The Crown’s own words

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 claim outlives colonial rule

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.

A history carried forward

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.