Nativizing the Imperial: The Local Order and Articulations of Colonial Rule in Sulu, Philippines 1881-1920

Abstract

This study is of how local legitimacy anchored and influenced colonial regimes in the southern Philippine archipelago of Sulu in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it explores how the internal contest to establish a native moral order defined the dimensions of Sulu’s incorporation into the American Empire upon its arrival in 1899. It also provides further insight into a general pattern of native-colonial interaction throughout island Southeast Asia: a region where chiefly rule was often leaned upon by western empires of the nineteenth century. Through this discussion, orthodox notions of colonization, conquest, resistance and of the workings of modern colonial states, are re-examined. Most importantly, it will reveal how local understandings of governance and legitimacy, much more than American ones, profoundly affected the formation of the ‘modern’ order in Sulu.

Through an examination of correspondence and dialogues with colonial officials, combined with contemporary and later twentieth century ethnographies and local oral literature recording colonial events, this study will venture to make the following key points: Firstly, The Americans, at their arrival in Sulu in 1899, slid into a long-established role as the colonial faction in the lingering contestations between elite rivals after the death of Sultan Jamalul Alam in 1881. Secondly, the Tausug, the predominant ethnic group in Sulu, were not opposed to foreigner rule, as much as they were opposed to what, in their understanding, was immoral rule. Individual Americans filled the local role of the stranger king, an institution produced out of the highly mobile, cosmopolitan Austronesian world of which Sulu and other insular Southeast Asian societies form a part. The alien-ness of the stranger king gave them the objectivity to mediate and bring justice over native faction leaders, who themselves were too enmeshed in the web of vendettas and jealousies that fueled conflict. When Americans played this locally determined role incorrectly however, they could rapidly lose their legitimacy. Third, what emerged in the first few years of the twentieth century were two different articulations of rule in Sulu. One was the rapidly constructed ‘modern’ colonial state found in American annual reports and correspondence to the metropolises of Manila and Washington. The other was the state as performed in Sulu by colonial agents for the local inhabitants, framed in the morality evidenced in the rituals of rule by local datu. As time went on, the Americans built the physical and institutional trappings of their modern state around the Tausug, reifying the cleavage between colonial and local. What resulted was ambivalence toward the modern state for its disconnection with the locality, and the persistence of an unofficial, locally driven parallel state with its pre-colonial rituals fully functioning in the shadow of the colonial state. Colonial rule in Sulu was a delicate, multi-faced and mutually stabilizing balance sustained by local leaders and colonial officials in keeping these rationalities complimentary rather than contradictory. A closer look at this interaction reveals the ways in which human societies in close, often antagonistic interaction, can rationalize and legitimize the operation of the state. Show more