Part 1

• “The Archipelagic Sultanates”: Mapping Entanglement of Islam, Global Trade and Indigenous Customary Law on the Statecraft of Austronesian Maritime States of Sulu and Gowa Muhammad Buana Leiden University

  In the historiography of Islamic civilization, the archipelagic nature of Sultanate of Sulu (now part of The Philippines) and Gowa in Makassar (now part of Indonesia) is often missed from scholarly discussions. Previously, studies related to the development of the sultanate government model on Sulu and Gowa are widely based on the assumptions that these political entities worked under the Islamic frame of dar al-Islam. The fact that culture and geography have prominent roles on molding special characteristics for both sultanates provide us with the opportunity to engage in new narratives about the dynamics in the Muslim world. This research focuses on the formation of complex political and legal traditions in both states during the 16th to 18th centuries. Both sultanates were indigenous political entities with regions covering vast and diverse local subjects that believed in pre-Islamic ancestral worship, treaty-making tradition and depended on patron-client relationships. This research aims to observe the types of political, legal formation, and legacy shaped by Sulu and Gowa. Despite consistently claiming to be sultanates and eagerly looked for legitimacy from Islamic authorities, both states still practiced the Austronesian type of government and adat (customary law) with a huge flexibility range.

• The British-Sulu Treaty of Commerce and Friendship in the 18th Century Philippines Joefe Santarita University of the Philippines

  Colonialism imposed gargantuan challenges to the indigenous peoples who suffered land displacement, physical abuses, as well as damage of cultures and traditions. Despite these miseries, the native population were not politically powerless. They skillfully adapted to this new environment, crafted strategies for their survival, and even negotiated the terms of domination. A good case in point happened during the brief occupation of Manila and by extension of the archipelago by the British from 1762 to 1764. Muslims in the south forged an agreement with the British which is known as the British-Sulu Treaty of Commerce and Friendship. This treaty allowed the British East India Company to establish trading posts and conduct commerce in the territories controlled by the Sultanate of Sulu particularly in Sulu Archipelago. The said treaty was part of Britain’s broader strategy to expand its influence in Southeast Asia during the Seven Years’ War.
  Drawn from archival materials such as Manilha Consultations and other Records of the Fort St. George as well as from secondary sources, this paper will investigate the role of the indigenous agency in forging the 1762 treaty with the British. In particular, this paper will examine the motivations and strategies of the British and “Xolians” (Muslims) respectively in realizing this accord. Moreover, it will also explore the role of Prince Israel in negotiating and making a treaty.

Part 2

• Revisiting the 1836-Treaties of the Philippine South Birgit Tremml-Werner Stockholm University Eleonora Poggio Linnaeus University

  This paper takes a comparative look at two prominent treaties between Sultanates in the Southern Philippines and Spain of 1836/37. It reiterates the shared intent between Muslim Mindanao chiefs, the Sultan of Maguindanao, the Sultan and the ruma bichara of Sulu, on the one hand, and Spanish authorities, on the other to negotiate and establish a modus vivendi based on mutually agreed treaties. Building on the important work of Majul, Laarhoven and others, this paper situates negotiations and power bargaining into a broader system of treaties initiated by the Spanish authorities that aimed to respond to local, regional, and international political and economic realities. Delving into a large amount of hither unexplored archival material from the Philippines and Spain it explores the different diplomatic strategies, negotiation practices, and political-economic outcomes, with a specific focus on the agency of Muslim Mindanao chiefs and Sulu stakeholders during the treaty-making process. It moreover examines the adaptation strategies taken by Spanish officials based on local circumstances and older relations with the different polities involved. In doing so, it engages with the changing nature of maritime administration and merchant capitalism, both beyond and within the fringes of Spanish colonialism.

• The Sulu Sultanate as a Diplomatic Actor Stefan Amirell Linnaeus University

  Among the indigenous states in insular Southeast Asia, the Sulu Sultanate stands out for its prolific diplomatic activity and extensive treaty-relations with several colonial powers, including Spain, the English East India Company, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Sulu’s treaties with these powers have for the most part been studied as part of the processes of colonial expansion and rivalry in Southeast Asia. In that vein, colonial agents are generally understood as being the active part and Sulu taking the role of the passive, receiving part, or ’treaty-taker’, in contrast to the European and American ’treaty-givers’.
  However, as Sulu’s treaty relations with European and American powers developed over the centuries, Sulunese actors acquired diplomatic skills, practices, and experiences, which were transfered between generations, both in the form of written texts and living memory. By the mid-nineteenth century – when colonial expansion began in earnest in the Sulu Archipelago – the Sulu Sultanate was thus an active and astute diplomatic actor and treaty-making party, whose representatives often were well-informed and able to assert their own and their country’s interests in the negotiations with European powers.
  Against the background of the focus in much of the current state-of-the-art on Sulu’s commerce and maritime raiding in the late eigteenth and nineteenth centuries, this paper seeks to highlight the diplomatic activities of the Sulu Sultanate. Based on primary sources, the paper highlights the agency, motivations and understanding of international relations of key Sulunese diplomatic actors in their negotiations with European and American powers.

• “Muslim Filipinos”: Negotiating Identity in Sulu, 1916-1934 Oli Charbonneau University of Glasgow

  The passage of the 1916 Jones Act saw a renegotiation of power in the Sulu Archipelago, with Christian Filipino colonial administrators replacing Americans. Already circumscribed by nearly two decades of U.S. colonialism, hereditary traditions of local governance – typified in the Sulu Sultanate and the datuship – eroded further, and Taus?g elites were left with a set of difficult decisions: advocate for political and cultural autonomy against the growing spectre of (Christian) Filipino nationalism; take on subsidiary identities within the nascent Philippine nation; or forge a path between these polarities. Building on the important work of Samuel Tan, Patricio Abinales, and others, this paper seeks to understand the (re)negotiation of Muslim Moro identity in Sulu between 1916 and 1935 – decades that marked a bridge between militarized U.S. imperial conquest and Filipino settler annexation. It does so by exploring the lives of several leading Taus?g figures during this era as they conjured their own visions of what integration – or anti-integration – meant. The paper argues that their responses never coalesced around a single approach, instead vacillating between the total rejection of “Muslim Filipino” status and the cautious embrace of minoritized existence in an expanded archipelagic identity. Produced under conditions of colonial duress, this fractured and fractious order would ultimately anticipate Sulu’s struggles in the decades following independence.

Abstract