0 Amity Doolittle 2003 Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34 1 97-126 02/2003 colonial rule, native land rights, Sabah, swidden agriculture, tobacco plantations This article tells the history of the settlement of North Borneo (present-day Sabah) by British colonial powers from 1881 to 1918, a proliferate period in property law formulation and modification. Using direct quotes from archival data such as administrative reports, memorandums and diaries from colonial officials, Doolittle elucidates the formal laws declared for land settlement as well as their de facto applications according to the laissez-faire principles that guided colonial thought. Such discourse and action are shown to have greatly reduced native customary land rights at the expense of commercial agricultural development by foreigners. Underlying forces that disempowered local people are the commodification of native lands, the over-simplification of customary native land rights and the operational complexities of legal pluralism. Belief in the superiority of Western law, scientific agriculture and commercialization fueled the colonization of North Borneo by the British-backed North Borneo Charter Company. But the territory's capitalistic founding principles and the Company's responsibility to create revenue for shareholders were at odds with the charter's mandate to respect native people's customary rights. The article's case studies show how upper level Company officers acted out of their duties to shareholders while officers in the field were more sympathetic to native people. This contradiction, plus an insufficient number of staff members and an inadequate budget greatly complicated the administration of the territory. The Company operated on an mutable set of land laws that glossed over the specifics of native customary rights to natural resources. The first section of the study examines three different time periods when native land rights issues came to a head and were modified by official documents or by decisions made by authorities, each time resulting in the loss of rights by natives. These cases each reveal how the motivations of individual company officers were enough to alter laws and drastically reduce native land rights. The second section of the article focuses on the Company's discursive and legal strategies that glorified tobacco plantations and vilified native swidden agriculture. Both land use systems used shifting, temporary forms of cultivation and had similar impacts on the forest, yet tobacco supplied the state with important tax revenues and native crop cultivation did not. In addition, tobacco plantations were considered to reflect the state of the art in agricultural science, while native techniques were considered backwards and wasteful. But in fact, by 1948 swidden plots had cleared only .315% of the forest territory, while as early as 1889 tobacco had alienated 4.4% of the land. The 1913 Ladang Ordinance restricted all temporary forms of native cultivation, while exempting tobacco; thus natives were the scapegoats of deforestation. Doolittle's in-depth archival research reveals aspects of the colonial paradigm that successively marginalized native people. Even though this is clearly illustrated through specific case studies, she caveats her article with the reminder that this history was written by colonizers, and not by native people. Prepared by Megan Glore