Speaking of white whales, The White Rajahs had long been a personal treasure which I sought to find. For years it evaded me. The book is, for whatever reason, out of print and extremely difficult to acquire. Its scarcity is frustrating, and yet it contains one of the most startlingly interesting and unknown accounts of modern history. I finally found a copy languishing away in Caliban Books, here in Pittsburgh, while I was getting rid of a lot of books after my move and having them appraised. I immediately snatched it up, with gusto and no small amount of giggling, using my newly acquired store credit.
Steven Runciman’s book is a history of the Brooke dynasty, which ruled Sarawak for three generations. James Brooke was a profligate son who used his inheritance to purchase a yacht and sail to the Far East. After assisting Bruneian authorities during a rebellion, he received control of Sarawak from Rajah Muda Hashim and the Sultan of Brunei. His authority did not originate with the British Crown. Britain later recognized Sarawak and assumed responsibility for its external affairs, but internal government remained with the Rajah. The Brooke state began, and largely remained, the personal project of a family.
I have always been fascinated by the ability of individuals to exert themselves upon history. The most obvious examples are the conquerors—Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon—who set forth and imposed themselves physically upon the world. Intellectual history offers its own examples. Nietzsche’s image of “philosophizing with a hammer” captures the scholar or philosopher whose strength, creativity, and daring alter the horizons within which later men think. The great adventurer belongs somewhere between these types. He seeks neither a throne nor a philosophical system, but refuses the limits of ordinary experience.
Sir Richard Francis Burton has always been my favorite representative of this adventurous spirit. He was a linguist, translator, anthropologist, traveler, and scholar, but also a duelist and explorer drawn to the occult, the taboo, and the unknown. He crossed deserts, entered Mecca in disguise, and searched for the source of the Nile. Burton combined intellectual and physical daring, although he did not seek to establish a political order of his own.
James Brooke joined these qualities to something further: personal responsibility. He did not merely penetrate a foreign world and return with knowledge of it. He remained and accepted responsibility for its future. His original accession was not a conventional conquest by a European army. He entered an existing crisis, demonstrated his usefulness, received authority from recognized local rulers, and gradually made that authority real. Force later became part of Brooke government, particularly in its campaigns against piracy and rebellion, but conquest and private enrichment do not adequately explain the project. What might have remained private adventure became public duty.
I do not believe that cultures must be treated as equal in their achievements. The British civilization which Brooke carried with him possessed greater material wealth, technical knowledge, political experience, and institutional capacity than the societies he encountered in Borneo. Those societies were divided by local tyrannies, slavery, piracy, headhunting, and inherited conflicts. Tradition did not necessarily make a custom worthy of preservation, nor did foreignness make reform illegitimate.
Civilizational superiority alone, however, could not make Brooke a legitimate ruler. A man demonstrates his fitness to rule through judgment and conduct. Brooke received recognition through treaties and alliances, won the loyalty of many of the governed, restrained predatory customs, and repeatedly placed Sarawak above his own enrichment. The dynasty needed money, sometimes desperately, but its members understood that money as a means of strengthening the state rather than as the principal reward of governing it. Their rule was paternal, but paternalism is not merely a euphemism for exploitation when the ruler accepts genuine duties toward the people in his care.
Brooke’s most important function may have been that of mediator. Sarawak contained Malays, Chinese, Muslims, Christians, and numerous indigenous communities, including the peoples Runciman calls the Land and Sea Dyaks. Their rivalries prevented any single community from providing the basis for a common political order. Because Brooke belonged to none of them, his foreignness could become an advantage. He stood above disputes in which every local power was already implicated. The outsider could serve as an arbiter precisely because he had no inherited place within the island’s network of feuds and obligations.
The Brooke project was therefore not simply an attempt to make the inhabitants English. It sought to create a common political allegiance above their differences. A nation need not be ethnically homogeneous, as nearby Singapore would later demonstrate with extraordinary success. It does, however, require more than different peoples living under the same ruler. It requires common institutions, habits of cooperation, and a willingness to act for a future shared with people outside one’s family or tribe.
Here the Brooke achievement remained incomplete. The dynasty created intense personal loyalty, but it did not fully transform that loyalty into national consciousness. Many inhabitants loved the Rajah and regarded his rule as beneficent. Yet when Japan invaded during the Second World War, affection for the dynasty did not become an organized national resistance capable of preserving the state. Japan was then overwhelming far larger and better-defended possessions throughout Southeast Asia, so Sarawak’s defeat should not be treated as a fair military test. Even so, the occupation exposed the fragility of a polity whose unity still depended heavily upon the person and memory of its ruler.
The Brookes never returned to exercise effective power after the invasion. Vyner Brooke remained Rajah in name and later ceded Sarawak to Britain, prompting an anti-cession movement among those who wished to preserve or restore the old order. That movement testifies to the dynasty’s enduring legitimacy, but it also reveals the tragedy of its disappearance. The people could remember the Brookes, desire their return, and lament their loss without possessing the institutions necessary to continue their project independently.
Runciman’s history fascinated me because it presents imperial adventure at its most personal. The Brookes were neither conventional colonial officials nor mere adventurers playing at kingship. They attempted to give political form to a divided country and treated that attempt as a sacred obligation extending across generations. James Brooke demonstrated the power of an exceptional individual to enter history and create a state; his successors demonstrated how such an act might become an inheritance.
Their failure was inseparable from their greatness. Sarawak became loyal to the Brookes without becoming sufficiently independent of them. They created subjects devoted to the Rajah, but not yet a nation capable of standing when the Rajah was gone. The White Rajahs is therefore more than an account of an eccentric colonial dynasty. It is a study of the possibilities and limits of personal rule: of how far individual will can give order to history, and of how difficult it is to make that order endure beyond the individuals who created it.
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