186

The Sultans of Brunei

? seventh century AD onwards

Northern Borneo

Brunei, on the north coast of Borneo, is an old-established sultanate which has survived until today as the State of Brunei. It has been surmised that emigrants from the South-East Asian mainland may have founded Brunei as far back as the seventh century AD, and there are sporadic mentions of it in Chinese sources of the next few centuries, since there were clearly trade contacts with China. Official Brunei wisdom today holds that the Brunei sultanate has been perpetually Muslim, and official genealogies and lore place the first Muslim rulers in the fourteenth or early fifteenth century. In fact, while Islam was doubtless established along the north Borneo littoral from an early time as a result of commercial contacts with Malaysia, Sumatra, etc., there is evidence that the sultans may not have been converted from the indigenous paganism until the early sixteenth century. The chronology for the Muslim rulers followed in the table above is essentially that of Robert Nicholl, what might be called a ‘shorter’ chronology; but, as noted above, official Bruneian historiography favours a ‘longer’ chronology going back 100 or 150 years earlier. It is nevertheless the case that only in the eighteenth century does the chronology becomes more or less certain.

The first Muslim sultans made Brunei the centre of a considerable empire, embracing most of Borneo itself, Celebes (modern Sulawesi) and the Sulu archipelago and even the southern Philippines. It was this empire which was first encountered by Spanish and Portuguese voyagers in South-East Asian waters; their reports and narratives, from those of Magellan’s expedition onwards, are a prime source for the history and chronology of the Brunei sultanate against which the indigenous tradition can be tested. The sultanate was torn by internal strife thereafter and became constricted by European pressures, with its authority confined now to northern Borneo. In 1841, much of this last had to be ceded to Sir James Brooke as Rajah of Sarawak, and in 1877 Brunei’s portion of northeastern Borneo was leased to British trading interests, eventually to the British North Borneo Company, reducing the sultanate to its present size. In 1888, Brunei became a British protectorate, and from 1906 a British Resident was installed. The exploitation of large reserves of oil and natural gas has revived the fortunes of Brunei in the twentieth century. It decided in 1973 not to join the Malaysian Federation; the sultanate became a constitutional monarchy under British protection, but since 1984 has been a fully-independent state known officially as Negara Brunei Darussalam.

The coins of the Sultans of Brunei are (like those of many other Indonesian dynasties) difficult to utilise as historical evidence, since dates are frequently not given on the coins, and titles of rulers are often recorded in an abbreviated or cursory manner, hence applicable to more than one ruler.

EI² Suppl. ‘Brunei’ (O. Schumann).

D. E. Brown, Brunei: The Structure and History of a Bornean Malay Sultanate, Monograph of the Brunei Museum Journal, no. II/2, Brunei 1970, 130–63.

Saran Singh, ‘The coinage of the Sultanate of Brunei, 1400–1980’, Brunei Museum Journal, 4:4 (1980), 38–103, with a genealogical table at p. 45.

idem, The Encyclopaedia of the Coins of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei 1400–1986.

Sylvia C. Engelen Krausse and Gerald H. Krausse, Brunei, World Bibliographical Series no. 93, Oxford 1988, Introd., with a genealogical table at pp. xlii-xliii.

Robert Nicholl, ‘Some problems of Brunei chronology’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 20 (Singapore 1989), 175–95.