Riverine trade sustaining the water city of the Brunei Sultanate and the impacts of modernization.

What is it about?

The article focuses on two aspects of Brunei, ‘riverine’ and ‘lifelines’, and how they have evolved drastically over time. It elucidates a world of river estuaries in the past, which connected the water city capital of the Sultanate to foreign traders as well as with natives in the hinterland. The pengalu (riverine merchants) was key to life and place-making, spawning villages along rivers, and facilitating exchanges of produces, knowledge and culture. Modernisation altered the lifeworld of the Sultanate, shifting people and economy from water to land. It also altered the physical environment, transforming estuaries and wetlands to dry land with narrow streams and artificial drainage as it accelerated natural sedimentation processes and promoted urbanisation. However, although reduced to its present territory in the 20th century, Brunei found a new lifeline with the discovery of oil and gas resources. It led to the development of the modern nation state and of a new lifeworld. However, by the dawn of the 21st century, climate change, which could be attributed to modernisation driven by global capitalism (rather than humanity as a whole), is threatening the ‘petro’ lifeline, largely by rising sea levels and increasing floods. Ironically, this would recharge river estuaries and a return to the old world, where society had to adapt to a semi-aquatic way of life.

Featured Image

Photo by Hung Li on Unsplash

Photo by Hung Li on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Brunei is not well-known, even in the region. It is often misunderstood as a small oil-rich state, an absolute monarchy that practises strict shariah law. Visitors have often described it as boring and quiet, but the locals are friendly. Even the ‘famed’ water village, often presented as a the “Venice of the East”, has been described as slum-like. However, the real Brunei is considerably different. The small nation state is a remnant of a vast kingdom in the past. The Sultanate, which was a major thalassocracy in the 15th century, has a territory that extended around Borneo and parts of the Philippines. The arrival of the British in the 19th century reduced the Sultanate to its present extent, which separated by the Sarawak territory of Limbang. Indeed, it was the British in particular and colonisation-globalisation by Western powers in general, which caused the most drastic change. This includes the physical environment and its culture and institutions, which has borne out of the Sungai Brunei estuary in the southwest corner of the Brunei Bay. The fact that the capital of a vast Sultanate was built entirely over water raises the question of how it was sustained, i.e., what are its lifelines? The research carried out reveal a world that was starkly different, but which has been transformed wholesale by modernisation, particularly since the turn of the 19th century.

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