Plantation Agriculture and the Formulation of Native Land Rights in British North Borneo c. 1880-1930

Abstract

One of the most durable consequences of the development of plantation farming in the tropics was the establishment of varied systems of native land rights which allowed administering authorities, whether colonial or otherwise, to demarcate, alienate and sell land to investors. Without the codification of land rights, land could not have been bought, sold and leased as a commodity and security of tenure for the overseas investor would have been uncertain. The development of such land rights in British North Borneo, now known as Sabah, between 1880 and 1930 is the subject of this paper. It is argued that the elaboration of a Land Code which classified land with native title, state land, and land leased to investors was closely linked with the development of plantation farming for tobacco and rubber. The paper seeks to examine the economic, legal and social context within which native land rights were formulated. IN MANY PARTS of late nineteenth-century South East Asia, the growing demand for commodities such as tobacco, timber, plantation rubber, oil and tin, was a major stimulus to greater foreign, especially European investment, in the production process. As many of the economies of the region experienced the effects of an expanding resource frontier, they became increasingly peripheralized within the global commodity market (Wallerstein, 1989) with the emergence of enclave sectors producing largely unprocessed products for export. The expansion of plantation systems of farming represents one example of such peripheralization. Whilst the structure and development of plantation farming shows considerable variation by both place and product, its effects on indigenous societies and their farming systems were often remarkably similar in the Tropics. The relationship between indigenous and plantation farming systems is of both historical and contemporary interest,