The history of Brunei

Brunei is a small sultanate on the northern coast of Borneo, today divided into two parts by the Malaysian state of Sarawak. Its rulers were once the most powerful in Borneo: from the fifteenth century the Muslim sultanate traded with China and the Malay world and drew tribute from coasts as far away as Sulu and Manila. Spanish, Sulu and later British pressure, civil wars and the rise of the White Rajahs of Sarawak stripped it of almost all its territory in the nineteenth century, and in 1888 it became a British protectorate. The discovery of oil in 1929 transformed its fortunes. Brunei chose not to join Malaysia in 1963, became independent in 1984 and remains an absolute monarchy under Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah.

Borneo has been home to modern humans for more than 40,000 years, as finds in the Niah Caves of neighbouring Sarawak show. Austronesian-speaking farmers and seafarers arrived from the north, probably by way of the Philippines, around 2500 to 2000 BCE, bringing pottery and rice. The indigenous peoples of Brunei, including the Dusun, Bisaya, Murut, Lun Bawang, Belait, Tutong and Kedayan, descend from these communities, which lived from rice farming, forest products and fishing along the rivers and coast. Bruneian Malay culture grew up among the coastal people who traded with the wider Malay world.

Chinese records describe a kingdom called Boni or Poni in north-western Borneo, which most historians link to early Brunei. Its ruler sent a letter to the Song emperor in 977, and in 1225 the Chinese official Zhao Rukuo wrote that Boni had a fleet of a hundred warships and great wealth. Its exports included camphor, prized in China and worth its weight in silver, as well as pepper, tortoiseshell and forest products. Its rulers' titles suggest Hindu or Buddhist influence, and the region fell at times within the commercial orbit of Srivijaya and later of Javanese Majapahit, whose court poem of 1365 lists Barune among its tributaries. In 1369 raiders from Sulu sacked the city, and a Majapahit fleet drove them out.

The national epic, the Syair Awang Semaun, tells a different story of origins: fourteen brothers founded the state on the Brunei River and chose one of them, Awang Alak Betatar, as ruler. He is said to have embraced Islam and taken the name Sultan Muhammad Shah, and the royal house dates the sultanate from 1368.

Islam came to Brunei with Muslim traders from the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and beyond, and by the fifteenth century the ruling house was Muslim. Brunei also sought the protection of the Ming dynasty. In 1408 its ruler, Abdul Majid Hassan, travelled to China with his family and a retinue of about 150 people, fell ill and died there; his tomb still stands outside Nanjing. The fall of Malacca to the Portuguese Empire in 1511 sent Muslim merchants to other ports, and Brunei benefited.

The sultanate's golden age came under the fifth sultan, Bolkiah, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Brunei's influence then stretched along the coasts of what are now Sarawak and Sabah and into the Sulu archipelago, and its royal family was linked by marriage to the Muslim rulers of Manila. The capital was a town of houses built on stilts over the water, the ancestor of today's Kampong Ayer. In 1521 survivors of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition visited it, and the chronicler Antonio Pigafetta described the sultan's court, its elephants and its bronze cannon.

Brunei's links with the Philippines brought it into conflict with the Spanish Empire. In 1571 Spanish forces took Manila from rulers allied by blood to the Bruneian court, and in 1578, after Brunei refused to stop spreading Islam in the Philippines, a Spanish fleet attacked in what became known as the Castilian War. The Spaniards captured the capital in April, while the sultan withdrew inland, but they left after about 72 days, weakened by disease and resistance. Brunei survived, but it lost its foothold in Luzon.

From the seventeenth century the sultanate declined. A civil war between rival claimants to the throne from 1660 to 1673 weakened the court, and the neighbouring Sultanate of Sulu grew stronger. Sulu later claimed that Brunei had ceded north-eastern Borneo in return for its help in the war, a claim that lies behind the later dispute over Sabah. Coastal nobles and chiefs increasingly governed their rivers as their own, and European shipping and piracy disrupted the old trade routes.

In 1839 the English adventurer James Brooke arrived in Sarawak, then a Bruneian province in revolt, and helped put down the rising. In 1841 the sultan appointed him rajah of Sarawak, and Brooke and his nephew and successor Charles Brooke steadily expanded their state at Brunei's expense. In 1846 the British navy shelled and occupied the capital, and the sultan ceded the island of Labuan to Britain, confirmed by treaty in 1847. From 1877 the sultan leased, and later ceded, northern Borneo to a British syndicate that became the British North Borneo Company. By the 1880s Brunei had shrunk to a fraction of its former size, wedged between Sarawak and North Borneo.

Seeking the protection of the British Empire against further losses, Sultan Hashim Jalilul Alam Aqamaddin signed a protectorate agreement with Britain on 17 September 1888, which gave London control of Brunei's foreign affairs. It did not stop the Brookes: in 1890 Charles Brooke annexed the Limbang valley, cutting Brunei into the two separate pieces that make up the country today. So frustrated was the sultan that in 1903 he even wrote that he would hand his country to the Ottoman Empire. A British official, Malcolm McArthur, reported sympathetically on the sultan's plight, and under a supplementary treaty of 1905 and 1906 a British Resident was installed whose advice the sultan had to accept in everything except Islam and Malay custom.

Under the Residents, administration and schools were reorganised and the royal palace moved from the water village to dry land. The decisive change came from beneath the ground. Oil was found at Seria in 1929, and by the 1930s the British Malayan Petroleum Company had turned Brunei into a significant producer. Revenue from oil paid for the protectorate and began to make the sultanate rich. Sultan Muhammad Jamalul Alam II, whose executive powers had passed to the Resident, encouraged Chinese immigrants to settle for their commercial skills and codified Islamic family law in 1912 and 1913, while his son Ahmad Tajuddin, who reigned from 1924 to 1950, quarrelled increasingly with British officials over the division of oil income and pushed for Bruneians to be appointed to senior posts in the civil service.

In World War II, forces of the Empire of Japan landed in December 1941, soon after British troops had sabotaged the oil wells. Brunei was governed as part of Japanese-occupied northern Borneo. Food shortages grew severe, and local resistance increased. Australian troops of the 9th Division landed in June 1945 and liberated the territory, though Japanese forces set fire to the Seria wells before retreating. British military rule lasted until civilian government was restored in July 1946.

Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien III, who came to the throne in 1950, used rising oil income to build schools, clinics, roads and the grand mosque that bears his name, and pressed Britain for self-government. On 29 September 1959 he proclaimed Brunei's first written constitution, which returned internal affairs to the sultan while Britain kept charge of defence and foreign relations.

Politics divided over the future. The Brunei People's Party of A. M. Azahari, which won the elected seats in the 1962 elections, wanted a unitary state of northern Borneo with Brunei's sultan at its head and opposed the plan for a Federation of Malaysia. On 8 December 1962 its armed wing launched the Brunei Revolt, seizing police stations and the Seria oilfield. British and Gurkha troops flown in from Singapore suppressed it within days, the party was banned, and the sultan began ruling under emergency powers that have been renewed ever since. The revolt was a prelude to Indonesia's confrontation with the new federation. In 1963, after long negotiations over oil revenues and the sultan's precedence among Malay rulers, Brunei decided not to join Malaysia and remained a British protectorate.

On 5 October 1967 Omar Ali Saifuddien III abdicated in favour of his son, Hassanal Bolkiah, who was crowned in 1968. A treaty of 1979 set the path to full independence, which Brunei gained on 1 January 1984, joining ASEAN and the United Nations the same year. The sultan is also prime minister and holds the defence and finance ministries, and no general election has been held since 1962. The state ideology, Melayu Islam Beraja, Malay Islamic Monarchy, presents the monarchy, Islam and Malay identity as the foundations of the nation.

Oil and gas have given Bruneians free health care and education, subsidised housing and no income tax, and among the highest living standards in South-east Asia, though the government has tried for decades to reduce its dependence on hydrocarbons. Across the river from the modern capital, Bandar Seri Begawan, the stilt houses of Kampong Ayer are still home to thousands of people, a living link to the water city the Spanish and Magellan's crew once saw. In 2014 the sultan began introducing a sharia penal code, and its final stage in 2019, which prescribed death by stoning for adultery and sex between men, drew international protest; the government then extended its moratorium on the death penalty to the new code. Hassanal Bolkiah celebrated fifty years on the throne in 2017 and is among the world's longest-reigning monarchs.