Articles of friendship and commerce record the East India Company dealing with the Sultan of Sulu as a treaty-making ruler.
British trade entered an existing polity
The East India Company sought commercial access in a region already organised around Sulu’s rulers and trading networks. The treaty sets out how the Sultan and the English chief would deal with disputes and commerce. It precedes the separate British North Borneo Company by more than a century.
Why this record matters
The treaty places British commercial access within an existing Sulu political order more than a century before the North Borneo Company.
Sources & further reading
01
Sulu and the East India Company
Willi · Internet Archive
Johannes Willi, The Early Relations of England with Borneo to 1805 (1922), Appendix II, pp. 137–138.