3 - The Resolution of Anglo-Spanish Claims and the Anglo-Dutch Boundary in North Borneo, 1878–1915

Summary

Introduction

By 1881, we see that three overlapping colonial spheres of influence had emerged in North Borneo. These included the Spanish sphere which involved jurisdiction over the former dependencies of the Sulu Sultanate from Pandasan to the Balik Papan River. The next was the Dutch sphere of influence which extended on the east coast up to Batu Tinagat and the Tawau River in the north. And finally, there emerged the British sphere of influence in the state of North Borneo with the establishment of the Overbeck-Dent Association (ODA) and the granting of the Royal Charter to the British North Borneo Company (BNBC) by the British Government in 1881. As noted in Chapter 2, Britain had already established a sort of paramountcy in the realm of the Brunei Empire through the Treaty of Friendship and Commerce concluded with Brunei in 1847. However, Britain did not venture into the area directly to exercise effective control. With the granting of the Charter to the BNBC in 1881, Britain somewhat sealed the weakness of its policy in North Borneo, and the question of its sovereignty became implicit. All the three spheres of colonial control criss-crossed as they were themselves a product of overlapping indigenous kingdoms. This kind of situation was bound to create conflict especially at the local level, and the home governments had to intervene to resolve the problems that arose on the ground between the BNBC, the Dutch East Indies Government and the Spanish authorities in the Philippines.

This chapter therefore examines how Spain and Britain settled the question of disputed sovereignty over parts of North Borneo by the Madrid Protocol of 1885. However, no attempt was made to demarcate the actual boundaries between the territorial possessions of these two powers. The dispute between the Netherlands and Britain pertaining to overlapping territorial claims in Borneo was settled by a long process of negotiations which began in the 1880s, leading to the Anglo-Dutch Boundary Convention of 1891, followed by an actual boundary delimitation exercise from 1912 to 1914 and culminating in the Boundary Treaty of 1915. The status of many small islands such as Pulau Sipadan and Pulau Ligitan was overlooked at the time, thus giving rise to the much later dispute in 1969 between Indonesia and Malaysia, the current focus of this work.