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

This paper makes a comparison between mechanisms of rule used during colonial and postcolonial Sabah. Despite Sabah's political independence from Britain in 1963, subjugation of native traditions by modern ideals continues. The author posits that knowledge was and continues to be invented and confirmed in the service of elite actors controlling access to natural resources. The discourse associated with this type of knowledge functioned in colonial times to favor commercial plantation agriculture and is presently employed in the pursuit of biodiversity conservation.

In order to analyze colonial constructions of power, Doolittle references property laws and archival records of correspondence between land administrators, government officials and plantation owners. She shows how their rhetoric was aimed at 'civilizing' the native population according to Western scientific and legal principles and at making Sabah's natural resources available for global consumption. Native rights to land were legally declared but in practice were overridden by the government´s priorities to support private plantations that yielded state revenues. Shifting swidden agriculture by native people was vilified as a wasteful and destructive practice while in fact there was no evidence to prove this and the colonial plantations destroyed incomparably vast amounts of forest. Such discourse, in addition to the gazetting and information classification by which colonizers interpreted and re-ordered the landscape, is what Doolittle refers to as the “invention and confirmation of knowledge”, and is used as a “technology of rule” (p. 823).

A year of fieldwork contributed to the author's conclusion that this technology of rule is still operating in post-colonial Sabah. She references the discourse of forest officers that debases indigenous knowledge and practices in favor of what they consider proper and modern uses of the forest, such as scientific research, relaxation, sport hunting and biodiversity conservation. Also included in her analysis of contemporary Sabah is the controversy over state appropriation of native land for inclusion into Kinabalu Park and the subsequent burning of this forest by the local inhabitants in 1990. Retracing the history of the state's chronic and corrupt manipulation of native rights for this piece of property, the author justifies this extreme act as local people's last resort for retaining their rightful land.

“Every action of the state associated with land and natural resources, from the colonial and throughout the postcolonial period, has taken rights away from the native population in Sabah” (p. 841), asserts the author. People and institutions in power continue to regard native people´s needs for natural resources as unimportant and necessitating intervention. In analyzing this rhetoric in Sabah, we are able to see that in other parts of the world as well, similar dogmas and paradigms underpinning conservation and development agendas could benefit from critical re-examination.

Prepared by Megan Glore