Revisiting the political economy and ethnicity of the sulu sultanate and its entanglement with the seafaring world

Abstract

The chapter examines how being a coalescence of localized power centres, characterized by political structures that were weakly centralized, the Sulu ruler was able to assume and maintain power against rivals in the Malay archipelago and colonial Spain through a complex interweaving of links engendered by trade, in particular, slave raiding and trade, obligatory and elite gift exchanges as well as warfare–links core to Southeast Asian political economies and the very foundations of political power. Building on James Warren’s work, the essay requestions some of the premises of that power. It hopes to explain how the political dynamics and other sources of power such as ethnicity and slave raiding of the Sulu sultanate came together to forge a coherence or lack of organization and identity.