The cession of Sarawak to the British Crown in 1946

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. Show more