Case Study III Bajau Laut Draft 2015.doc (1)

“Outside Elements”:
The Nationality and Statelessness of Nomadic
Peoples
Case Study III: The Bajau Laut of

Malaysia

Heather Alexander
CONTENTS
I

INTRODUCTION

2

II

The Bajau Laut
4
II.A
Boat Nomadism...........................5

II.B
The Bajau Laut and Territory 5
II.C
The Bajau Laut and Belonging during the Sulu Sultanate 5

III

The Colonial Period
7
III-A
Borders and Sovereignty . .
11 III-B
Consolidating
the
British
Malay World..............................12
III-C
Economic Development and
Settlement..................................12

IV
”Indigenous” and ”Immigrant”:
Race, Ethnicity, Religion and Belonging in
Malaysia
13
IV-A
Immigration and the Invention of ”Race” in Malaysia . 14
IV-B ”Indigenous” in Malaysia . . 16 IVC
The Laws Protecting Indigenous and Aboriginal Peoples in Malaysia........................16
IV.D
”Indigenous” and ”Immigrant” in Malaysia Today . .
17
IV.E
Ethnicity and Immigration
in Sabah.....................................18
V
The Malaysian Federation: Nationality Law, Statelessness and Registration
18
V-A
Statelessness and ”Immigrant Groups” in Malaysia . 19

V-B Nationality in Malaysia . . . 20 VC
Malaysia and Protections

V-D

against Statelessness..................22
Nationality in Sabah..................23

V.E
V.F

V-G

Nationality, Voting and Immigration in Malaysia Today 23
Registration, Identity Documents and Irregular Migration 24
V-F.1
Registration
and
Identity
Documents

Issued by Malaysia 25
V-F.2
Irregular
Immigration,
Documents and
Identity in Sabah 26
Sovereignty, Borders and
Natural Resources.....................29
V-G.1
Borders
and
Sovereignty . . . 30
V-G.2
Oil and Gas in
Sabah.......................32
V-G.3
Oil and Gas,
Borders
and
Sovereignty . . . 33

VI

The Bajau Laut Today
34
VI.A
Missing the ”Window”: Bajau Laut and Registration at
Independence.............................36
VI.B
Immigration and ”Security”
in Sabah Today..........................36
VI.C
The Bajau Laut, Security
and Immigration........................37
VI.D
The Bajau Laut and Documentation...................................38
VI.E
Responses to Statelessness:
Assimilation and Settlement 39
VI.F

Borders, Natural Resources
and Conservation.......................42

VII

Conclusion

44

VIII

Maps
VIII.A

45

VIII.B
VIII.C

Map of ”Sea Nomad” Areas: Moken (blue), Orang

Suku Laut (orange) and Bajau Laut (green).........................45
Map of the British North
Borneo Company......................45
Map of the Area Currently
Claimed by the Sulu Sultanate 45

VIII.D
VIII-E

Philippine and Malaysian
Oil and Gas Exploration . . 45
Disputed Border Claims . . . 45
D.I.

INTRODUCTION

The Bajau Laut are a nomadic group who have
lived for centuries in the Celebes and Sulu Seas
between the southern Philippines and the island
of Borneo, now split between Sabah, Malaysia,

and Kalimantan, Indonesia.1 Despite living in the
region for centuries, today many Bajau Laut are
considered foreigners in Malaysia; outsiders and
pariahs. Many Bajau Laut in Malaysia are stateless, lacking identity documents and subject to
deportation. In particular, the Bajau Laut are frequently lumped together with immigrants from
the Philippines, part of the ”crisis” of irregular
migration in Sabah that has become one of the
leading political issues of the day. The Bajau Laut
are also viewed as suspect in the ongoing tensions
over sovereignty and borders between Malaysia
and her neighbors. In this Case Study, I discuss
the root causes of statelessness among the Bajau
Laut.
The Bajau Laut’s ”outsider” status is rooted in
their history of nomadism and their ”traumatic
experience of adjustment to a sedentary way of
life has been shared almost universally by other
no- madic peoples in the path of colonial
expansion.”2 Since the colonial period, the Bajau
Laut have come to be associated with piracy and

criminality, their nomadism a threat to security in
a sensitive border region, and lacking in a ”fixed
attachment” to territory or a homeland.3 As Chao
puts it, ”sea nomads” are thought of by
governments as
1

Helen Brunt, The Vulnerability of Bajau Laut (Sama Dilaut)
Children in Sabah, Malaysia Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network
(2015) 3. The ”sea nomads” of southeast Asia can be divided into
three main groups: the Moken of Thailand/Burma, the Bajau Laut
of Malaysia/Philippines and the Orang Suku Laut of Indonesia.
Lioba Lenhart, ”Recent research on Southeast Asian sea nomads”
36 and 37 Nomadic Peoples 245 (1995) 246.
2
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 109.
3
Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The
Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 1. See for example
references to criminality in ”water villages” in Sabah, in Tan Sri

Datuk Amar Steve Shim Lip Kiong (Chairman) and
Commissioners, Report of the Commission of Enquiry on
Immigrants in Sabah, Royal Commission of Enquiry (2012) 43.
See also Cynthia Chao, in Customary Strangers: New Perspectives
on Peripatetic Peoples
in the Middle edited by Joseph C. Berland, Aparna Rao 310.

”wanderers” and ”strangers”, incapable of forming
the sort of attachments necessary for belonging to
a nation-state.4 Various governments, beginning
with the British and continuing with the
governments of Malaysia and of Sabah, have tried
alternatively to settle the Bajau Laut or deport
them as foreigners in an attempt to eliminate
nomadism.
The experience of the Bajau Laut in Malaysia
mirrors that of other sea nomadic groups in the
Philippines and Thailand. Few Bajau Laut remain nomadic today, as most have succumbed to
the pressures of modernization and coercive and
forced settlement in an attempt to gain nationality

and recognition of their rights.5 In some cases,
settlement and assimilation, such as conversion to
Islam, has led to the Bajau Laut being recognized as nationals. For many Bajau Laut, however, particularly those who have settled more recently, nationality is unattainable because they
lack documents, often going back decades to
colonial independence and the introduction of
Malaysian nationality.
Since the 1970s, Malaysia has enjoyed steady
economic growth, despite the financial downturn
in the 1990s, and relative political stability. 6
Malaysia is now a destination country for
immigrants and an economic powerhouse in the
region.7 Much of the wealth comes from oil and
gas discovered off shore of Sabah, making the
traditional territories of the Bajau Laut some of the
most valuable territory in the world. At the same
time, the coral reefs and unique ecosystems of
Borneo have made it a major tourist destination.

of once peripheral zones of the region have become hotly contested
political territory, with levels of environmental stress and degradation
showing signs of crisis.”8

Yet prosperity has eluded the Bajau Laut, even
as they abandon their traditional lifestyle in an
attempt to be included in the new states in which
they find themselves. The Bajau Laut, like many
nomads, have struggled to keep their identity in
the new world of nation-states that has grown up
around them. As Farish Noor puts it in his blog
post on identity and the nation-state in southeast
Asia,

”(c)ategories like ’citizen’ and ’foreigner’ are modern labels that we,
Southeast Asians, have inherited
from our colonial past...On the one
hand we still retain the residual
traces of our primordial roots to
land and sea that tell us that this
region is our shared home. But we
also happen to be modern citizensubjects living under the modern
regime of the racial census, the
identity card, the passport and the
national flag.”9

”(T)he land, resources and cultures
4
Cynthia Chao, in Customary Strangers: New Perspectives on
Peripatetic Peoples in the Middle edited by Joseph C. Berland,
Aparna Rao 324.
5
In the Philippines, the previously nomadic Sama Dilaut are
now almost entirely settled by the government in ”Bajau villages.”
During the Moro civil war, many relocated and settled in Sabah.
Francis C. Jumala, From Moorage to Village: A Glimpse of the
Changing Lives of the Sama Dilaut 39 Philippine Quarterly of
Culture and Society (2011), pp. 87-131.
6
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 6.
7
Kaur calls Malaysia ”the largest labour-importing country in
southeast Asia. Amarjit Kaur, Refugees and Refugee Policy in
Malaysia, (2014) 81. See also Azizah Kassim and Ragayah Haji
Mat Zin, Policy on Irregular Migrants in Malaysia: An Analysis
of its Implementation and Effectiveness (Philippine Institute for
Development Studies 2011) 16.

8

Hirsch, Philip, Warren, Carol, Politics of the Environment in
Southeast Asia (Routledge 1998) 13.
9
Farish A. Noor, Associate Professor, S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies, NTU University Singapore, ”Between a Fluid
Region and a Hard State” Rappler Blog, 4 March 2013.

D.II. T HE BAJAU LAUT
The Bajau Laut, also known as the Sama Dilaut, are a boat-dwelling, nomadic people. 10 There
is evidence of sea nomadism off the coast of
what is now Sabah going back as far as 3,000
years.11 The Bajau Laut traditionally live almost
entirely on boats, coming to shore only to trade
sea products and collect fresh water.12 Today, only
a small minority of Bajau Laut continue to
practice nomadism. In Sabah, most Bajau Laut
have settled on islands such as Pulau Bum Bum or
in pile- house villages, such as Bangau Bangau
village off the coast of Semporna town.13
Traditionally, Bajau Laut migration followed a
seasonal pattern, with boats travelling to northern
Borneo in the early part of the year.14
In 2002, anthropologist Clifford Sather published an article in the journal Nomadic Peoples
stating that there were only a few thousand Bajau
Laut still practicing nomadism in Sabah.15 Today, the number is much smaller, probably approaching zero.16 Sather describes the Bajau Laut
as a ”small seafaring minority within a larger
Sama/Bajau speaking population,” meaning that
the primary difference between the Bajau Laut
and the Bajau Darat, or land Bajau people, is the
10
Clifford Sather, ”Comodity, Trade, Gift Exchange, and the
History of Maritime Nomadism in Southeastern Sabah” 6 Nomadic
Peoples 20 (2002) 20; Carol Warren, ”Consciousness in Social
Transformation: The Bajau Laut of East Malaysia” 5 Dialectical
Anthropology 227 (1980), 227. See also the Encyclopedia Britanica
online at http://www.britannica.com/topic/Sama-people (accessed
October 2015). The term ”bajau laut” is used to distinguish
nomadic bajau from the ”bajau darat”, or settled bajau, nomadism
being the primary difference between the bajau laut and the much
larger populations of bajau peoples living on land. Clifford Sather,
The Bajau Laut; Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime
Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah Oxford U. Press, Oxford,
Singapore, New York, 1997 8. Some anthropologists do not like to
use the term ”nomadic” for the Bajau Laut, because ”nomadic”
implies pastoral nomadism. I use the term here for convenience.
Lioba Lenhart, ”Recent research on Southeast Asian sea nomads”
36/37 Nomadic Peoples 245 (1995) 245. While the Bajau Laut refer
to themselves by a number of different names, I will use the term
”Bajau Laut” as this is a term commonly employed by researchers.
Sather, ”Commodity” 24.
11
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 14.
12
Sather, ”Commodity” 23; C. Warren ”Consciousness” 227-228.
13
Ali 159.
14
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 6566.
15
Sather, ”Commodity” 23.
16
current nomadic bajau population.

former’s nomadism.17 Warren describes Bajau Laut
society as ”sub-nuclear”, meaning that it is not
centralized, but has a relationship with another,
more centralized society. 18 The Bajau Laut have
always been treated as a group apart from the
land-based peoples they live among, occupying
the ”periphery” and often looked down upon as
a ”pariah people”, despite their recent attempts to
assimilate by settling and converting to Islam. 19
Indeed, as Sather points out, the land-based peoples of Borneo were forever trying to ”explain”
the Bajau Laut, giving rise to several origin myths
of the Bajau Laut as a group who had been cast
out of Islam and regular society.20
Today, many Sabahans consider the Bajau Laut
to have ”originated” in the Philippines, despite the
presence of Bajau Laut in Sabah for thousands
of years. In the words of one participant in a
workshop in Sabah on the issue of conservation,
”The Sama Dilaut are not original people of
Sabah. They are from the Philippines...They must
learn about religion, education and living in a
house.”21 In the eyes of many Malaysians, the
Bajau Laut are a ”marginal group” of
”questionable origin.”22
In this case study, I explore the intersection
between the nomadism of the Bajau Laut and their
exclusion and statelessness, looking at their status
from the pre-colonial period until the present day.
In particular, I will focus on how the establishment
of the present day borders between Malaysia,
the Philippines and Indonesia has affected the
Bajau Laut, as they have become caught up in
Malaysia’s concerns regarding its border security
and sovereignty over territorial waters and the
resources contained within and beneath the ocean.
In both their way of life and their outsider
status, the Bajau Laut are similar to other sea
nomad ethnic groups including the Moken in
Thailand and
17

Sather, ”Commodity” 23. See also
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 109.
19
Sather, ”Commodity” 25, 35. Julian Clifton and Chris Majors,
”Culture, Conservation, and Conflict: Perspectives on Marine Protection Among the Bajau of Southeast Asia” 25 Society and Natural
Resources 716 (2012).
20
Sather, ”Commodity” 36-37.
21
Brunt, quoting a workshop participant, 37.
22
Ismail Ali, ”Since Birth till Death, What is their Status? A Case
Study of the Sea Bajau in Pulau Mabul, Semporna”, 1 Journal of
Arts, Science and Commerce 156 (2010) 157.
18

the Orang Suku Laut in Indonesia.23 In this case
study, I will also refer from time to time to the
parallel experiences of the Moken and Orang Suku
Laut.24
A. Boat Nomadism
Until the mid-1950s, Bajau Laut lived almost
exclusively in boats, with each family occupying a boat.25 Boats of families would travel the
seas, fishing for valuable sea cucumber and other
commodities to trade.26 Groups of families would
share anchorage points, to which they would
return periodically to trade with shore-based
peoples and collect fresh water.27 The Bajau Laut
were part of vast trading network bringing
products like sea cucumber to China. Many
families had exclusive trade relationships with
Malay patrons from the land-based aristocracy in
Borneo in exchange for physical protection. But
while the Bajau Laut depended on their patrons for
protection, they had a great deal of
independence.28 While each Bajau Laut family
was in a sense beholden to their patron, the Bajau
Laut were free to regulate their internal affairs
without interference and also to change patrons as
it suited them.29 Nevertheless, having a patron was
vitally important in an age
of ”endemic
violence” on the high seas, and the Bajau Laut
were very much integrated the local hierarchy,
serving as the first link in a chain of trade
stretching to the Imperial Court in Beijing.30
23

Note that while the Moken also suffer from statelessness, the
Orang Suku Laut generally do not. See generally Human Rights
Watch, ”Stateless at Sea: The Moken of Burma and Thailand”
25 June 2015 at https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/06/25/statelesssea/moken-burma-and-thailand, on the Moken. See generally
Walter White, ”Sea Gypsies of Malaysia” (Ams Pri 1922, 1981).
See also Cynthia Chou Indonesian Sea Nomads; Money Magic and
fear of the Orang Suku Laut Routledge Curzon London and New
YOrk 2003, on the Orang Suku Laut.
24
See maps.
25
Sather ”Commodity” 27.
26
Sather ”Commodity” 27.
27
Sather, ”Commodity” 27. See also Clifford Sather, The Bajau
Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society
of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 67.
28
Sather, ”Commodity” 27-28.
29
Sather ”Commodity” 28-29. See also Clifford Sather, The
Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing
Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 61.
30
Sather ”Commodity” 30. See also Timothy P. Barnard,
”Celates, Rayat-Laut, Pirates: The Orang Laut and Their Decline in
History” 80 Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society 33 (2007) 34.

B. The Bajau Laut and Territory
The Bajau Laut were not without any sense
of territoriality, though the ocean was a shared
space. Each family would control a particular
moorage point or points, but in general Bajau Laut
families would fish in the same general areas,
becoming intimately familiar with their geography
and resources.31 Though each family would fish
mostly within a certain area, they would also from
time to time take longer voyages to visit relatives
to what is now the Philippines and Indonesia.
With the rise and fall of subsequent empires,
the Bajau Laut were constantly getting used to
new centers of power and shifting boundaries.
Anthropologist Cynthia Chou writes of the Orang
Laut, a related sea nomad group living around
what is now Indonesia, that they view borders
as ”temporary markers” that shift along with the
changing political realities of the region imposed
upon them by outside groups, but that the sea
nomads themselves see the region as essentially
borderless.32 This migration and lack of fixed residence has led to claims that the Bajau Laut ”do not
have a homeland” upon which they could advocate
for their traditional sovereignty, unlike land-based
groups.33 Regardless of the actual relationship of
the Bajau Laut to the areas they inhabit, they
are viewed by others in the region as lacking a
homeland or fixed connection to one place.
C. The Bajau Laut and Belonging during the Sulu
Sultanate
Trade was always the foundation of the economy in southeast Asia, with records of trade with
India and China going back to the fifth century,
and records of Bajau maritime trade since at least
1,000 BC.34 James Warren refers to the ”Sulu
31
Sather ”Commodity” 27. See also Cynthia Chao, The Orang
Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The Inalienable Gift of Territory
(Routledge 2010) 10.
32
Cynthia Chou, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau (Routledge 2010)
80.
33
Missing the boat? Inside Indonesia, Chris Majors and Joanna
Swiecicka.
34
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 11. See also Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History
of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 2935. See also Nicholas Tarling, Sulu and Sabah; A Study of British
Policy Towards the Philippines and North Borneo from the Late
18th Century Oxford U. Press, New York, Melbourne, 1978 1.

Zone” as a ”web of exchange.”35 During the precolonial period, the region was a ”free and open
migration zone” without fixed political borders or
immigration laws, an autonomous region between
the areas controlled by the colonial powers of
that time: the Dutch and Spanish.36 Borneo was
an important locus of trade, and the Bajau Laut
formed an integral part of the supply chain.37
Many of Malaysia’s earliest inhabitants were
nomadic, with many different groups inhabiting
both the Peninsula and Borneo, such as the Orang
Asli of peninsular Malaysia.38 More recently, the
region that is now divided between Malaysia,
Indonesia and the southern Philippines was made
up of various Sultanates organized around great
trading cities, such as Melacca, Johor and Kuta
Raja (Banda Aceh), cities that were closely linked
by regional and long-distance trade and family and
historical ties.
Today’s maritime borders cut through the ancient spheres of influence of various Malay kingdoms, which were oriented towards the ocean,
rather than towards the jungle-covered interiors.
These Sultanates did not have territorial borders,
but rather ruler-client relationships with various
subject groups, including the ”sea nomad” populations in the region. The entire Sultanate could be

relocated in times of need.39 This does not mean
that the Sultanates had no concept of territoriality,
rather that they did not impose strict boundaries.40
Fixed borders would come only with colonialism.
On Borneo, the Sultanates of Sulu, centered
around the Sulu Sea, and Brunei, centered on
northern Borneo, came to be the dominate powers
in the region. For many centuries, they prospered
off long distance Arab trade in pearls, sea cucumber and other sea products, particularly with India
and, later, China.41 Over time, Brunei declined and
Sulu became more prominent, winning the loyalty
of the coastal and nomadic Bajau peoples.42
Trade with China led to a huge increase in
demand for sea products, and the rulers of the
Sulu Sultanate turned to slave raiding to increase
their workforce. Bajau Laut were occasionally employed by other groups not only in the collection
of sea products but also as the crew for slaving
boats.43
By the end of the eighteenth century, as the
Sultanates declined, piracy and slave raiding in
the Celebes and Sulu seas increased, dominated
by the Illanun peoples, who sometimes employed
Samal and Bajau fishermen and sea nomads as
crew.44 But as Chao points out, the Malay Sultans
differentiated between true piracy and legitimate
raiding on behalf of themselves, making the line

35

James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone: 1768-1898 (Singapore
UP 1981). See also James Francis Warren, Looking Back on The
Sulu Zone: State Formation, Slave Raiding and Ethnic Diversity
in Southeast Asia Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal
Asiatic Society Vol. 69, No. 1 (270) (1996), pp. 21-33, 23.
36
Marshall Clark and Juliet Pietsch, Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: Cultural heritage, politics and labour migration (Routledge
2014) 158. See also James Francis Warren, Looking Back on The
Sulu Zone: State Formation, Slave Raiding and Ethnic Diversity
in Southeast Asia Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal
Asiatic Society Vol. 69, No. 1 (270) (1996), pp. 21-33, 23.
37
Philippine-Malaysia Dispute over Sabah: A Bibliographic Survey Erwin S. Fernandez Department of Filipino and Philippine
Literature, University of the Philippines, Diliman 53. See also
Lioba Lenhart, ”Recent research on Southeast Asian sea nomads”
36 and 37 Nomadic Peoples 245 (1995) 247.
38
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 12-14. The Orang Suku Laut, sea nomads operating
around the Peninsula, had an important relationship with the Malay
aristocracy going back hundreds of years and were crucial to the
establishment of Johor after Melaka fell to the Portuguese. Virginia
Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and
West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 72-77. See also Cynthia Chao,
The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The Inalienable Gift of
Territory (Routledge 2010) 8.

39

Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The
Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 42, 50.
40
Malaysia rejected Singapore’s claim that the Sultanate of Johor
did not have a concept of territoriality. See generally International
Court of Justice, ”Sovereignty over Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh,
Middle Rocks and South Ledge (Malaysia/Singapore)” 2008.
41
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 61, 62, 80.
42
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 80.
43
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 113. See also Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut:
Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of
South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 36. See also Stefan Eklof,
Pirates in Paradise, A Modern History of Southeast Asias Maritime
Marauders (Nias Press 2006) 5. See also James Francis Warren,
Trade for Bullion to Trade for Commodities and Piracy: Cina, the
West and the Sulu Zone, 1768-1898 in Stefan Eklof Amirell and
Leos Muller, Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and StateFormation in Global Historical Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan
2014).
44
Stefan Eklof, Pirates in Paradise, A Modern History of Southeast Asias Maritime Marauders (Nias Press 2006) 9. See also
Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The
Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 23.

between raiding and trading somewhat blurry. 45 In
pre-colonial southeast Asia, the seas around
Borneo were less dividers of land masses than
they were linkages between trade-oriented citykingdoms in constant competition with each other
for trade and manpower.46 The Bajau Laut, while
remaining a great deal of independence, also
served the Sultanates as fishermen and crew for
raiding ships.47 But the Bajau Laut were always a
people apart, separated from the coastal dwelling
peoples by their nomadic way of life and animism, able to relocate or change patrons at will. 48
Throughout their history, groups of sea nomads
have always abandoned boat nomadism when it
suited them, merging into the coastal Bajau peoples in order to obtain greater status. Other Bajau
groups have taken to nomadism to enjoy greater
freedom.49 The colonial period, however, was to
see the beginning of a long decline in boat nomadism.
D.III.
T HE C OLONIAL P ERIOD
With the colonization of the Sulu Sultanate
came the beginning of the mass settlement of the
Bajau Laut. As Warren puts it, ”(t)heir mobility
and independence from the land gave them a
practical immunity from government authority...”
making their settlement, ”imperative.”50 Warren
continues; ”(e)ssential to the establishment of
thourough con- trol in the region would be a
reorientation of the Bajau toward a surplus
productivity involving them in a cash economy
and in more sedentary habits.”51
45

Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The
Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 55. See also Clifford
Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a
Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP
1997) 4344. See also Timothy P. Barnard, ”Celates, Rayat-Laut, Pirates:
The Orang Laut and Their Decline in History” 80 Journal of the
Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 33 (2007) 35.
46
This point is made most compellingly by James Warren in ”The
Sulu Zone”. See also Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of
Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 16-17.
47
Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 141.
48
CONSCIOUSNESS IN SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: THE
BAJAU LAUT OF EAST MALAYSIA Author(s): Carol Warren
Source: Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 5, No. 3 (NOVEMBER
1980), pp. 227-238 227.
49
Lioba Lenhart, ”Recent research on Southeast Asian sea nomads” 36 and 37 Nomadic Peoples 245 (1995) 248.
50
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 77.
51
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 7778.

The British administrators considered the Bajau to
be a ”martial,” ”rebellious” people who could not
be governed except by their conversion to a settled
way of life.52 As I discuss in this section, the
colonial powers saw settlement of the Bajau Laut
as key to controlling north Borneo, and nomadism
became associated with lawlessness and a vacuum
in sovereignty.
The Spanish came to the Sulu Sultanate in 1578,
conquering the Sultanate in the early 1600s and
signing a series of treaties with the Sultan in the
mid-1600s and 1700s.53 The Spanish were mainly
focused on trade with the Sultanates, however, and
large-scale changes to the way of life in Borneo
did not begin until the arrival of the British.
In 1824, with the Spanish in decline, the British
and Dutch, the latter having by this point gained a
foothold in southern Borneo and Sumatra, signed
the Anglo-Dutch Treaty dividing southeast Asia
into ”spheres”, with the Peninsula in the British
”sphere” and the Indonesian islands in the Dutch
”sphere.”54 No mention was made of Borneo.
This treaty set aside centuries of trade and political unity between the Indonesian islands, including Sumatra, and the Malaysian peninsula.55 The
British slowly set up a system of indirect rule on
the Peninsula, similar to their other colonies. Four
of the British controlled city-states on the Peninsula eventually became the Straits Settlements, a
Crown Colony, with the capital at Singapore.56
The remaining Peninsular states became British
Protected States.57
Meanwhile, northern Borneo was of low
priority to the British and, as a result, was not yet
under British government control. It slowly came
to be within the British ”sphere”, ruled by the
ever
52
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 106107.
53
Najeeb M. Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law and Religion
(Department of the Interior, Philippines, 1905) 164.
54
Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 132. For a detailed
description of the subsequent establishment of the border, see
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 49-50.
55
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 125.
56
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 126. See also Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History
of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 135.
57
Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 135.

weakening Sultanates of Brunei and Sulu, and
came to the attention of various British
adventurers looking to make money in southeast
Asia.58 The British North Borneo Company
(BNBC) signed an agreement with the Sultan of
Sulu in 1877, granting control of what is now
Sabah to the Company. 59 A Chartered Company,
the BNBC typified the public-private, semimilitary nature of British expansionism of an
earlier era, and was an anachronism in the late
1800s, filling a void in the spreading nation-state
system that was slowly encompassing the globe. 60
The Company had sovereign powers like those of
a state, but was unofficial and lacked the resources
of a state.61
Next door, James Brooke of England founded
Sarawak in 1839, taking over much of the former
Brunei Sultanate, which his family ruled as their
personal kingdom until the end of World War
Two.62 Despite their sweeping claims on maps
from the period,63 neither concern had much control over their supposed territory; the BNBC had
only three officers in 1882.64 Warren describes the
BNBC as ”relatively weak,” but that it
nevertheless left a ”profound impression” on the
Bajau Laut.65 What control the BNBC and Brooke
family did have was based almost exclusively on
the coasts, as had been the case for the Sultanates
before them, and it was on the coasts that the
BNBC and Brooke family began to establish their
sovereignty.
Because the British administrators had so little
control over the interior, they focused much of
their attention on securing British shipping in
the area. Ending piracy, by which the British
58

South Asia Defence And Strategic Year Book, Colonel Harjeet
Singh 216.
59
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 188. See also Kevin Young, Willem C. F. Bussink, Parvez
Hasan, Malaysia: Growth and Equity in a Multiracial Society
(Johns Hopkins UP 1980) 12. See also Virginia Matheson Hooker,
A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and
Unwin 2003) 131. See also Warren, ”The British North Borneo
Company” 33-35.
60
Warren, ”British North Borneo Chartered Company 2-3.
61
Warren, ”British North Borneo” 3.
62
Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 109.
63
See maps.
64
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP
1997) 45.
65
Warren ”North Borneo Chartered Company” ix.

meant raiding of British ships, became a priority.
What the British called ”piracy” in Borneo was
often attacks by rival, local traders to some extent
sponsored by the Sulu Sultanate, whose income
depended on trade that was now being supplanted
by the British.66 The British were alarmed by the
lack of centralized authority in Borneo, left to its
own devises by the weakening Sultanates of Sulu
and Brunei, and devistated by the constant attacks
by rival groups to control trade.67 The crackdown
on piracy and the introduction of a police force
made the area safer for settlement and increased
trade.68 But the settlement of the Bajau Laut was
more than simply an indirect result of the arrival
of the BNBC, it was very much a part of a
deliberate strategy to stamp out nomadism and
encourage settlement.
The reason why the colonialists opposed nomadism was in part because it represented a threat
to their sovereignty. The coastal peoples could be
taxed, their trade-based economy transitioned to
agriculture. But the Bajau Laut were in the habit
of decamping to Jolo whenever they were
confronted with an authority in Borneo they didn’t
like. It was primarily to end these movements and
bring the Bajau to heel that the colonial
administrators instituted a program of settlement.
Brooke and the BNBC viewed nomadism as
practically synonymous with ”piracy”, which was
not only a threat to British trade, but a threat to
their fledgling sovereignty.69 To end piracy and
promote more controllable economic activity, both
the BNBC and the Brooke family (as well as
the Spanish in Jolo, who were then replaced by
the Americans) forced the local communities to
transfer from an ocean and trade based
economy

66

Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 135-136. See also Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut
of Riau, Indonesia: The Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge
2010) 55.
67
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Company” 44-45.
68
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 45.
69
James Francis Warren, Trade for Bullion to Trade for Commodities and Piracy: Cina, the West and the Sulu Zone, 1768-1898
in Stefan Eklof Amirell and Leos Muller, Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and State-Formation in Global Historical
Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) 167.

to agriculture.70 Brooke launched a violent military
offensive against ”piracy” in the region,71 and, in
the early twentieth century, the BNBC began an
anti-piracy program targeting the Bajau peoples.72
While the BNBC and the American authorities
claimed ”roving bands of Bajau”, or ”bad hat Bajaus”, as one administrator called them, plied the
seas and islands between the two powers,
attacking outposts and raiding shops, though it is
not clear to what extent the Bajau Laut were
actually involved in piracy and raiding as opposed
to fishing and trade.73 In fact, piracy was
dominated mostly by other, shore-based groups.
By the 1840s, the colonial powers had come to
dominate the seas around the Peninsula, reducing
non-colonial trade, with disastrous results for the
local economy.74 The Bajau Laut and Orang Suku
Laut were particularly affected.75 The reduction
in ”piracy”, by which the British often meant
trade and pillage not controlled by themselves,
led to a sharp decline in the Sulu Sultanate and
a breakdown of the patronage system that has
sustained the Bajau Laut for centuries.76
No group in Borneo resisted the BNBC like
the Bajau Laut.77 The resistant Bajau Laut were
caracturized as ”rebels.”78 They were specifically
70
James Francis Warren, Trade for Bullion to Trade for Commodities and Piracy: Cina, the West and the Sulu Zone, 1768-1898
in Stefan Eklof Amirell and Leos Muller, Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and State-Formation in Global Historical
Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) 168-170.
71
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 128-129.
72
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP
1997) 47.
73
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 9193.
74
Stefan Eklof, Pirates in Paradise, A Modern History of Southeast Asias Maritime Marauders (Nias Press 2006) 11. ”Piracy”
persisted in the Sulu Sea under the weak Spanish government until
the United States gained sovereignty over the Philippines in 1898.
75
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 134-135. See also Timothy P. Barnard, Celates, RayatLaut, Pirates: The Orang Laut and Their Decline in History 80
Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society
(2007), pp. 33-49, 35.
76
James Francis Warren, Looking Back on The Sulu Zone: State
Formation, Slave Raiding and Ethnic Diversity in Southeast Asia
Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Vol.
69, No. 1 (270) (1996), pp. 21-33, 30.
77
Warren, ”British North Borneo” 4.
78
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 14.

targeted as ”pirates” who were a ”disgrace” to
the region, their nomadic way of life seen as a
threat to the security of British shipping, British
sovereignty against other colonial powers, and
agricultural development in the Borneo interior.79
The Bajau in general were seen as too involved
with the Sulu Sultanate, loyal to the Sultan and not
to the British.80 Settlement of ”sea nomads” was
a universally adopted solution to the ”problem”
of uncontrolled mobility, and the colonial powers
worked to limit the areas in which the ”sea nomads” could travel.81 This brought to an end the
Bajau Laut long distance migrations to what is
now the southern Philippines and Indonesia.82
Along with boat licenses and forced settlement,
discussed below, movement restrictions began to
decrease the numbers of Bajau Laut practicing
nomadism.83 Fi- nally, starting in 1909, the BNBC
began relocating Bajau villages to more central
locations near big towns to contain them and halt
their migrations.84 This brought many nomadic
Bajau Laut groups into contact with British
administration for the first time.85
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the
BNBC had begun to gain enough control over
the local population that they could begin to put
into place a system of indirect rule similar to
that in other British colonies. In 1898, the BNBC
began to appoint of local leaders and make inroads
into the interior.86 With greater control over the
interior came greater opportunities for agriculture,
which the BNBC wished to promote, shifting the
population from a trade-based economy, which
the British saw as competition, to agriculture for
79

Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The
Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 55-58.
80
Warren, ”The British North Bornoe Chartered Company” 92.
81
Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The
Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010).
82
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP
1997) 30.
83
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 136.
84
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 9394.
85
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 94.
86
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP
1997) 46. SEe also Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of
Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 138.

export.
The seafaring Bajau peoples, both nomadic and
those based in coastal villages, posed a real challenge to this shift from loosely controlled
maritime trade to highly regulated agriculture. 87 To
justify the settlement of the Bajau Laut, and the
relocation and centralization of coastal Bajau, the
British administrators described the Bajau way of
life as ”wretched”, implying that any change
would be
an improvement for the Bajau
themselves, cast- ing the shift from a maritimebased lifestyle to agriculture as part of their
development from a primitive way of life to a
modern one.88 Settlement and centralization
therefore came to be associated with
modernization and economic growth, though as I
will explain below, the BNBC’s attempts at
agriculture in Borneo were not a success.
The first crop the BNBC attempted in Borneo was the coconut tree, which provided the
excuse for their first attempt at mass relocation
and settlement of the Bajau. The BNBC relocated
Bajau peoples, both nomadic and sedentary, from
remote islands to the mainland for the planting of
coconut trees.89 They cleared the jungles, settling
the Bajau peoples and employing them as workers
in some of the first large-scale farms in Borneo. 90
Settlement of the ”roving” Bajau Laut was not
really necessary to obtain workers for the new
plantations, as the BNBC also imported Chinese
workers for this task. Rather, it was key to shifting
the Bajau Laut away from nomadism and ”piracy”
to a mode of life that was easier for the colonial
administrators to control.91 Carol Warren calls the
efforts by the British to settle the Bajau Laut as
87

Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 141. Lioba Lenhart,
”Recent research on Southeast Asian sea nomads” 36 and 37
Nomadic Peoples 245 (1995) 248.
88
Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The
Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 8.
89
Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 141. See also Clifford
Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime
Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 27. See
also Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 69.
90
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in
a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP
1997) 47.
91
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP
1997) 49.

”strenuous”.92 It involved massive manpower and
policing to round up scattered villages and flotillas
of Bajau peoples and train them to grow coconuts,
but the British were undeterred by the difficulties
presented.
At first, the Bajau Laut ignored British efforts
to settle them for agriculture, but when the United
States took over in the Philippines from the weak
Spanish administration in 1898, the Bajau Laut
could no longer relocate to the southern Philippines to escape British policies, and settlement
accelerated.93
In a further attempt to crack down on Bajau
Laut migration and raise revenue, the BNBC
introduced a system of boat registration. 94 While
not onerous in amount, the Bajau peoples
generally viewed this as an impermissible attempt
to restrict their free- dom of movement.95 As
Sather explains, for most of the first decade of the
twentieth century, the BNBC was almost wholly
occupied with enforcing boat registration as a
means to collect revenue, control ”dangerous”
movements, and ”claim” the Bajau Laut as
Company subjects against the claims of other
colonial powers.96 British agents traveled the
islands collecting licenses.97 After considerable
resistance, boat registration was finally, grugingly,
accepted by the Bajau, which fed the sharp reduction in long distance boat travel. 98 Boat
registration was relaxed after independence, and
then aban- doned, as by that point most Bajau
Laut families had settled in ”water villages” near
urban centers like Semporna.99
92

C. Warren, ”Consciousness” 228.
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 79.
94
See generally Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered
Company” 79-98. See also Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short
History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin
2003) 141. See also Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation,
History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern
Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 47.
95
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 80.
96
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP
1997) 47.
97
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 82.
98
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP
1997) 47. A similar system of boat registration was introduced by
the United States in the Philippines.
99
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP
1997) 69.
93

In addition to programs settling the Bajau Laut
and restricting their movement, the BNBC also encouraged settlement through more indirect means.
The founding of Semporna Town, for example,
was a key moment in the settlement of the Bajau
Laut, by providing a center for what had been
dispersed trade; a central market for trading all
ocean prod- ucts in one place, and providing
security in the form of police and, eventually, a
navy, the role that had been formally played by
the Bajau Laut’s wealthy, settled patrons.100 The
British also granted pardon to Bajau who broke the
law, as well as convicted pirates, sometimes even
releasing them from prison, in exchange for their
settlement.101
A. Borders and Sovereignty
As the British administrators of north Borneo
began to track and limit the movements of the
populations under their control, a process that
went hand in hand with developing agriculture,
they also sought to impose fixed borders to protect
against the incursions of other colonial powers.
The notion of nation-states with fixed borders and
formal nationality was introduced to southeast
Asia during the colonial period.
The new post-colonial states that
emerged in Southeast Asia after
1945 inherited the idea of a system
of sovereign states with fixed maritime and territorial boundaries.102
Borneo and the territories controlled by the Sulu
Sultanate and the Brunei Sultanate had been divided arbitrarily between vying colonial powers.
These arbitrary frontiers between the colonies
were to become the borders between modern
nation- states. The colonial period therefore
marked the beginning of southeast Asia’s division
into arbi- trary political units, slicing through
former em- pires, including the Sultanate of Sulu,
and laying the foundation for a multitude of
modern border
100

Sather ”Commodity” 38-39. Virginia Matheson Hooker, A
Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and
Unwin 2003) 142. See also Warren, ”The British North Borneo
Chartered Company” 66-67.
101
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 83.
102
Stefan Eklof, Pirates in Paradise, A Modern History of Southeast Asias Maritime Marauders (Nias Press 2006) 13.

disputes.103
The late 19th and early 20th centuries were
dominated by a number of changes of sovereignty
in the region, leading to a confusing succession of
shifting and unclear borders. Beginning in 1863,
Spain gained dominance over the Sultanate of Sulu
at Jolo, forcing the Sultan to sign a series of
agreements of capitulation, bringing what is now
the southern Philippines under Spanish control.104
At the same time, the Netherlands East India
Company had established itself in Borneo in the
17th and 18th centuries.105 The 1878 agreement
between the British North Borneo Company and
the Sultan of Sulu and similar agreements between the Sultan of Brunei and the Brooke family
brought northern Borneo into the British sphere.106
Southern Borneo remained under Dutch control.107
In 1891 and again in 1915, the Dutch and British
officially established the border between their
colonies in Borneo, which became the modern-day
border between Malaysia and Indonesia.108 Finally,
in 1930, the boundary between north Borneo and
the Philippines was fixed by the British and the
United States (the latter had taken over what is
now the southern Philippines from the Spanish.)
These agreements between colonial powers took
no account of the outlines of the traditional territories of the Sultanates they were replacing, or
the social links between peoples on the ground.
Today, there are multiple border disputes between Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia due
to the complex history of shifting borders and
the multitude of historical documents establishing
103

These border disputes are discussed in greater detail in the
section on borders after independence, below.
104
ICJ, CASE CONCERNING SOVEREIGNTY OVER PULAU
LIGITAN AND PULAU SIPADAN (INDONESIA v. MALAYSIA)
(MERITS) Judgment of 17 December 2002
105
ICJ, CASE CONCERNING SOVEREIGNTY OVER PULAU
LIGITAN AND PULAU SIPADAN (INDONESIA v. MALAYSIA)
(MERITS) Judgment of 17 December 2002.
106
ICJ, CASE CONCERNING SOVEREIGNTY OVER PULAU
LIGITAN AND PULAU SIPADAN (INDONESIA v. MALAYSIA)
(MERITS) Judgment of 17 December 2002
107
Leigh Wright, Historical Notes on the North Borneo Dispute
25 J. of Asian Studies 471 (1966).
108
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 190. ICJ, CASE CONCERNING SOVEREIGNTY
OVER PULAU LIGITAN AND PULAU SIPADAN (INDONESIA
v. MALAYSIA) (MERITS) Judgment of 17 December 2002. For
more on the establishment of the border, see Warren, ”The British
North Borneo Chartered Company” 48-51.

sovereignty by one or another power at different
points in time.109
B. Consolidating the British Malay World
By 1919, the British administrations in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur were increasingly looking at uniting the Peninsula territories with the
Borneo territories, which had officially become
protectorates in 1888, but which remained under
the administration of the BNBC and the Bro