The cession of Sarawak to the British Crown in 1946
Date
1977
Authors
Reece, Bob H. W.
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Abstract
The cession of Sarawak by the third Rajah to the British
Crown finally resolved the ambiguous position of a European-ruled
Malay state which remained within the British imperial system for
100 years without being a formal part of it. External pressures,
principally the Japanese invasion, had made direct British control
both necessary and irresistible. The problem of the succession
also helped to ensure that the Rajah’s agreement was not difficult
to obtain. But it was already apparent in the 1930s that Brooke
rule had come to the end of the road and could only look backwards.
The Brooke administration’s failure to re-define native interests
in the light of economic and social developments had removed the
rationale upon which the Raj was avowedly based. The legitimization
of cession was a grubby affair undertaken more for the benefit of
British domestic opinion than the people of Sarawak. Nevertheless,
it provided an issue which fostered the political development of
Sarawak from a loose group of communities linked only by a common
acceptance of the Rajah’s authority to a multi-racial state with
its own nationalist tradition. Sarawak nationalism took the form
of a movement to restore Brooke rule but it envisaged the
establishment of an independent native state in which power would
be shared between the Malays and the Ibans.
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