The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography

Five. Metaphorical Perspectives of the Sea and the Sulu Zone,1768–1898

145 five Metaphorical Perspectives of the Sea and the Sulu Zone, 1768–1898 James Francis Warren My initial encounter with the Sulu Zone, located between the Asian mainland and the large islands of Mindanao, Borneo, and Sulawesi, began forty-five years ago. I first learned of the Sulu Archipelago and the maritime world of the Samal Bajau Laut when I received my Peace Corps posting in 1967, assigning me to Semporna, Sabah, on the east coast of Borneo, in the area where present-day Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines meet. The search for historical antecedents to contemporary social change among the Samal Bajau Laut, whose maritime nomadic culture was being inexorably extinguished by political and economic development, initially involved me in a historical study of the interaction between a relatively weak quasi-colonial agency, the North Borneo Chartered Company, and the maritime nomadic people of the northeast coast of Borneo between 1878 and 1909. Much of the research was performed during a vacation period while I served in Sabah as a Peace Corps Volunteer.1 On Seeing the Zone: Framing, Commodity-Chain Analysis and the Metaphorical Perspective Framing The maritime populations that were dependent on the sea for their economic pursuits—trading, raiding, collecting, and fishing—had re- 146 The Sea mained largely caricatures in the historiography of the region. I gradually realized, that the Samal Bajau Laut’s marginalized view of Taosug, or Sulu history and interpretation of past events, was a historical perspective from the very edge of a wide-ranging trading sphere that centered on the Sulu Sultanate. To be released from the conceptual constraints of conventional historical geography, I called this web of economic influence and interpersonal relations a “zone.” Following in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel, I abandoned the insular geographic perspective of earlier historians of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Borneo, for a more dynamic definition of the Sulu Sultanate’s boundaries based on larger scale systemic processes of socioeconomic change and a borderless history of a wide-ranging maritime trading network oriented toward China, Singapore Europe and the United States (fig. 1).2 I argued that in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there existed a loosely integrated political system that embraced island and coastal populace, maritime nomadic fishers, and slash and burn agriculturalists of the coastal rim and interior foothills in the Sulu Archipelago, the northeast coast of Borneo, the foreland of southern Mindanao, and the west coast of Celebes. Coastal datus forged political links and trade pacts with riverine swidden cultivators on Borneo’s east coast. Upland tribes, hunters and gatherers, and nomadic boat people formed subject groups who performed procurement roles for Sulu’s export trade with China and the West. This network of interpersonal relations which was fluid and subject to disruption across time was integrated by the commercial marauding patterns which came to be concentrated in the Sulu Sultanate as the key redistributive center for the zone in the late eighteenth century. By foregrounding the conceptual-theoretical importance of the “zone” (as Braudel did in his masterpiece on the Mediterranean), I was able to place the various maritime peoples—the Taosug, Balangingi Samal, Samal Bajau Laut, Iranun, and Magindanao—in their sociohistorical contexts and thus begin to understand the process of how maritime trading states evolved and expanded in Southeast Asia. By altering the spatial and temporal dimension of my research, a far more comprehensive history of how a maritime “frontier” region resisted and responded to the impact of the global economy and Western imperialism began to emerge. I had created a radically distinctive cultural-ecological “framework” for reinterpreting and re-presenting the interregional history of a Malayo-Muslim sultanate situated at the edges of the territorial boundaries of three colonial empires. My attempt to experiment with such a different form of framing and contextual presentation enabled Fig. 1. Map of the Sulu Zone. The Sulu Zone constituted a Southeast Asian economic region with a multiethnic, precolonial Malayo-Muslim state and an ethnically heterogeneous set of societies of diverse political backgrounds and alignments. These diverse ethnic groups were set within a strategic hierarchy of kinship-oriented stateless societies, maritime nomadic fishers, and forest dwellers. In terms of world commerce and economic growth, the Sulu Zone was not an important region until the end of the eighteenth century. Map courtesy of the author. 148 The Sea me to concentrate on the historical complexities and connections at work then...