Sulu Series · Episode 4 — The Sulu Zone: Trepang, Slavery, and the Qing Banquet Economy (1663–1848)
Sulu Series — Episode 4 of 5. ← Previous: Episode 3: The Fort That Could Not Be Held · Next → Episode 5: The Treaties That Ended a Sultanate. Full arc: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5.
A Sultanate at Its Height
For most of two centuries after Spain evacuated Zamboanga in 1663, the Sulu Sultanate was the dominant maritime power of the southern Philippine archipelago and the western edge of the Celebes Sea. It conducted treaty relations with Britain and the Netherlands. It commanded fleets that ranged from the Tawi-Tawi shoals to the coast of Luzon. It exported, year after year, the luxury sea-products that Qing dynasty China consumed at its most elaborate banquet tables. It was — by every measure that mattered to early modern international order — a sovereign state.
The Spanish colonial archive does not say this. The Spanish colonial archive calls it piratería. The Royal Audiencia in Manila, the Jesuit historians, the captains of provincial garrisons: all of them, for two hundred years, characterized Sulu and its allied raiding communities as a problem of disorder, of brigandage, of religious enmity. The frame did not change until 1981, when an Australian historian named James Francis Warren published a book that reorganized everything.
That book is The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898. It is the indispensable modern work on this period. Almost everything in this story is downstream of it.
The Hundred Years That Nobody Wrote Down
Before we can describe the Sulu Zone at its height, an honest acknowledgment is required: the period from 1663 to roughly 1768 is the most poorly documented century in all of Sulu history.
Spanish observation collapses with the 1663 evacuation. The garrison that had been the source of nearly all Spanish-language reports on Sulu is gone. Manila’s interest in Sulu, for two generations, becomes minimal — a matter of episodic raid responses rather than systematic intelligence. The Sulu side does not produce a written archive of its own that has survived. The Tarsila chronicles record dynastic succession but not the texture of governance. Chinese sources mention Sulu only sporadically. European observation is essentially absent until the British begin probing the region in the mid-18th century.
Warren begins his analysis in 1768 because that is roughly when the documentary record becomes thick enough to support systematic argument. Before that, we know that the Sultanate continued to exist, that succession occurred, that trade with China continued, and that the raiding system persisted — but we know these things in outline only. The internal political and economic life of Sulu in the late 17th and early 18th centuries is largely lost.
This gap matters. It is one of the reasons the colonial-era characterization of Sulu was so distorted. There was a long stretch when Sulu was effectively unobserved by external powers, and when external observation resumed, what those observers reported was filtered through a century of accumulated stereotypes.
Warren’s Reframing
What Warren did was straightforward in retrospect and revolutionary at the time. He took the Sulu raiding system — which had been characterized in two centuries of colonial scholarship as “piracy,” as “anarchy,” as the violent residue of an ungoverned periphery — and he showed that it was none of those things. It was a structured commercial-labor procurement system, organized around a specific economic logic, feeding a specific export market.
The export market was Qing dynasty China. The Qing economy in the 18th century was the largest and richest in the world. Its elite consumed luxury goods at a scale that drew commodities from across the Indo-Pacific. Among the most valued of those luxuries were three Sulu-zone products:
- Trepang (sea cucumber; bêche-de-mer) — consumed as a high-prestige banquet food, valued for both its taste and its medicinal properties under the ben cao tradition
- Pearls — for jewelry and ceremonial use
- Edible birds’ nests — for the celebrated bird’s-nest soup, served at the highest tables of the Qing court and elite
The Sulu archipelago, with its coral reef systems, its pearl-oyster beds, and its proximity to the cave systems of Palawan and Borneo, sat at the geographic source of all three. The Chinese junk trade brought silks, ceramics, weapons, and metal goods south to Jolo; the Sulu return cargo carried the luxury sea-products north to Amoy and Guangzhou. This was not casual barter. It was a standing commodity chain of significant volume and high economic value, integrated into the wider South China Sea trading system.
The labor required to sustain this commodity chain was enormous. Trepang must be harvested by divers (working long, dangerous shifts in shoal waters), then processed at seasonal outposts (boiling, gutting, smoking, drying — labor-intensive and skilled work), then transported to Jolo and other entrepôts for resale to Chinese merchants. Pearls require specialized diving in the Tawi-Tawi and Sibutu passages. Birds’ nests require seasonal expeditions to remote cave systems on Palawan and the Borneo coast. The Sulu Sultanate did not have a free labor force on the scale this commodity chain demanded.
What it had — what it built — was a slave-procurement system.
The Iranun and the Balangingi
The raiding labor of the Sulu Zone was not supplied by Tausug. This is one of the most important clarifications Warren’s work delivers, and one that older popular accounts consistently flatten. The Sulu Sultanate was the political and commercial core of the Zone; the raiding fleets that procured the captive labor were drawn primarily from two distinct ethnolinguistic communities operating in the Sultanate’s orbit but not under its direct administration.
The Iranun were a Maranao-related community based around Lanao and the Illana Bay coast of western Mindanao. They spoke a language not mutually intelligible with Tausug. Their political center was distinct from Jolo. They emerged in the 18th century as the dominant long-range raiding community of the Sulu Zone, operating fleets of large outrigger raiding proa called lanong.
The Balangingi Sama were a Sama-Bajau subgroup based in the Sarangani-Basilan area. They were Sama linguistically and culturally; they were politically distinct from both the Tausug and the Iranun. Warren documents them as semi-autonomous client-raiders, supplying captives and labor in exchange for Sultanate patronage, naval support, and access to the Jolo trade entrepôt.
Conflating these three communities — Tausug, Iranun, Balangingi — under the single label “Moro” or “Sulu pirates” is the fundamental analytical error of the Spanish colonial archive. They were three peoples, with three languages, three political traditions, and three different relationships to the Sultanate.
The relationship was symbiotic. The Iranun and Balangingi raiding fleets needed the Sulu Sultanate’s market access, naval base, and diplomatic shelter. The Sultanate needed the captive labor that the raiders procured. Tausug society itself was not a slave-raiding society in the same way — its role was political-commercial, the management of the entrepôt and the long-distance trade with China.
The Lanong and the Monsoon
The instrument of the raiding system was the lanong: a heavy outrigger war proa, roughly 20 to 30 meters long, crewed by 100 to 200 men, equipped with bow-mounted bronze swivel guns (lantaka) and sail-and-oar propulsion. It was a purpose-built long-range slave-raider. It was substantially heavier than the older caracoa tradition, with a deeper draft and greater cargo capacity for captives.
The raiding circuit followed the monsoon with great precision. Fleets departed Iranun and Balangingi bases on the southwest monsoon (June to September), sailing northeast into the Visayas and as far as the Luzon coasts. They raided coastal communities — taking captives, livestock, and stored goods — and concentrated their activity during the months when the wind would carry them home. They returned south on the northeast monsoon (November to February). The seasonal logic was tight; the geographic range was enormous. Warren documents Iranun raiding as far as the Singapore Strait and the Java Sea.
Captured people did not simply “disappear into slavery.” Warren reconstructs the absorption pathways in considerable detail. Some captives were ransomed back to their families when possible. Some were retained as oarsmen for the next raiding season — the lanong required a continuously replenished pool of crew labor. Some were sold to inland datus in Mindanao or to other regional buyers. A significant number were directed into the trepang-processing outposts and the pearl-diving stations, where they became the labor force of the very commodity chain whose demand had driven the raids in the first place.
The system was self-reinforcing. Each raiding season produced both the export goods (because of the captive labor) and the next season’s rowers (because of the captive bodies). It was a closed economic loop that sustained itself for the better part of a century.
What the Slave Took With Them
It is important not to flatten this system into either a colonial-style “barbarism” narrative or a celebratory “indigenous resistance” narrative. The Sulu Zone slave economy caused immense human suffering. The captured were torn from their communities, transported across hundreds of nautical miles of open ocean, and forced into labor under conditions whose mortality rates Warren and others have documented as severe. Tens of thousands of Visayans, Luzon coastal villagers, and other Southeast Asian people lived and died inside this system. To name it as economically rational does not soften the moral fact.
But the captured also carried language, food, ritual, and skill into the Sulu Zone, and over generations, many were absorbed into Sulu, Iranun, and Balangingi communities — their descendants becoming Tausug, Sama, or Iranun in subsequent generations. The ethnic boundaries of the southern archipelago were not fixed; they were continuously reworked by the very labor system the raids produced. This is one of the painful ironies of the Sulu Zone: the violent procurement system also produced cultural and demographic admixture across the southern Philippine and Borneo coastal world.
The Commodity Chain, End to End
The full trepang chain, as Warren reconstructs it, runs through six clear stages:
| Stage | Location | Labor source | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harvesting | Coral reefs of Sulu/Celebes Sea | Sama-Bajau divers (free and bonded) | Live sea cucumbers |
| Initial processing | Seasonal outposts, southern Sulu Sea | Bonded/captive labor | Boiled, gutted, smoked product |
| Secondary processing | Jolo, Tawi-Tawi entrepôts | Mixed labor | Dried trepang, ready for export |
| Long-distance shipping | Junks and Sulu vessels | Chinese merchant crews; Tausug traders | Trepang in cargo holds |
| Distribution in China | Amoy, Guangzhou | Chinese mercantile networks | Wholesale and retail channels |
| Consumption | Qing elite households | Domestic servants; banquet kitchens | Trepang at banquet |
A piece of trepang harvested from a Tawi-Tawi reef in 1820 might, six months later, be served at a wedding banquet in a wealthy Cantonese household. The labor that harvested and processed it was the labor of someone seized in a Visayan coastal raid, perhaps in the same year. This is what the Sulu Zone was: a single integrated economic system spanning ocean distances, linking coral reef to Qing banquet table through a chain of human labor whose first link was forced.
The Treaty-Capable Sovereign
Throughout this period — and this is where the question of sovereignty becomes important — the Sulu Sultanate was treated by every major external power as a sovereign treaty-capable state.
The British, who began commercial probing in the South China Sea after the loss of the American colonies, concluded a formal alliance with Sulu in 1761. The agreement explicitly recognized the Sultan as a sovereign authority. The British East India Company subsequently sought trading rights, military support against rivals, and territorial concessions on the Borneo coast — all through formal diplomatic channels with the Sultanate, not through colonial fiat.
The Dutch, operating from Batavia, treated Sulu similarly: as a hostile or friendly power depending on circumstance, but always as a power with which one negotiated. Dutch naval activity against Sulu in this period was framed as inter-state action, not as colonial pacification.
The Spanish, even at the nadir of their position in the southern archipelago, continued to negotiate with the Sultanate — concluding a series of peace treaties through the 18th century, each of which acknowledged the Sultan’s authority over his own territory.
The Qing Chinese state did not formally treat with Sulu as a sovereign, but its tributary system implicitly recognized the Sultanate as the political authority through which Sulu trade was organized. Chinese junk captains negotiated with Sulu authorities for protection, port access, and dispute resolution as they would with any sovereign port-of-call.
By every standard of early modern international order — effective territorial control, capacity to make treaties, recognition by other powers, conduct of independent foreign relations — the Sulu Sultanate from 1663 through the mid-19th century was a functioning sovereign state.
The Two Sovereignties
This is the place to introduce an idea that becomes central in the next story of this series. When we ask whether Sulu was sovereign, we are usually asking the wrong question — or rather, we are asking only one of two important questions.
The first question is: did the Sultanate possess the kind of legal-formal sovereignty recognized by external powers? The answer, in this period, is unambiguously yes. The Sultan signed treaties. Foreign powers respected his authority over his territory. He was, by 18th-century international standards, a sovereign monarch.
The second question is: did the Tausug people, the Sama-Bajau communities, the Iranun polities — the actual peoples of the Sulu Zone — exercise self-government over their lives? The answer here is more complex but equally yes, and in some ways more deeply so. They lived under a hybrid customary-Islamic legal system (the Agi-agi sa Sug), governed by their own datus and panglimas, organized by kinship, structured by the ritual calendar of Islamic and pre-Islamic observance, fed by halal food norms that distinguished them from the Christianized lowlands, navigating their own seas in their own vessels, speaking their own languages, raising their children in their own systems of meaning. This was sovereignty in the older and more durable sense — the sovereignty of a people over the conditions of their own life.
The first sovereignty — the legal-formal Sultanate sovereignty — would be progressively lost to colonial powers between 1848 and 1915. That is the story of the next installment.
The second sovereignty — the lived, communal, cultural sovereignty of the Sulu peoples — would not be lost in the same way. It would be assaulted, marginalized, and dispossessed of its political form. But it would not disappear. It survives, in attenuated and transformed form, in the present-day Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, in the persistence of Tausug as a living language, in the continuity of Sulu maritime and culinary tradition, in the ritual life of the communities.
To collapse these two sovereignties into one — to say that “Sulu lost sovereignty in 1915” — is to miss the most important thing about how empire actually worked in the southern Philippines. The Sultanate was terminated. The peoples were not.
What Ended the Zone
The Sulu Zone, as a self-sustaining commercial-political system, was destroyed not by Spanish religious zeal or American military might (though both played roles) but by a piece of technology: the steam gunboat. From the late 1840s, Spanish naval operations using steam-powered vessels could pursue lanong fleets against the wind and the monsoon. The seasonal logic that had structured the raiding system for a century became a vulnerability rather than a strength. Within a decade, the Iranun-Balangingi raiding capacity was broken. The Spanish destruction of the main Balangingi settlements in 1848 marked the structural end of the raiding system; the broader Sulu Zone economy unraveled in its wake.
But that, again, is the next story. What ends in 1848 is a particular economic-military configuration: the Zone as a self-sustaining slave-raiding-and-trepang-export system. What does not end is the Sultanate, which survives as a polity until 1915, or the Sulu peoples, who survive as communities to the present day.
A Sovereign State, Reframed
If the conventional Spanish-era narrative of Sulu as “pirate-haunted periphery” is wrong — and Warren has demonstrated that it is — then we owe the period a different framing. The Sulu Sultanate from 1663 to 1848 was a maritime state in the same sense that Venice was a maritime state, or Oman, or any number of other early modern polities whose power was organized around sea-trade and naval capacity. It conducted foreign relations. It maintained an export economy. It dominated a defined oceanic space. It supported a political-religious court culture. It produced and reproduced its own legal and ritual order.
The fact that its export economy was partly built on slave-procurement raiding does not disqualify it from sovereign status. So were the Atlantic colonial economies of the same period. So was the early American republic. The Sulu Zone was not exceptional in this; it was typical of early modern maritime states whose wealth was built on coerced labor.
What made it exceptional was something else. It was one of the few non-European maritime sovereignties of its period that maintained itself, fully independent, for nearly two centuries in a region surrounded by aggressive European colonial powers. It did so through a combination of geographic advantage, military innovation, commercial integration with the Qing economy, and a political structure that European observers consistently failed to understand.
That structure — the Sultanate above, the distributed datu networks below, the Iranun and Balangingi communities operating as semi-autonomous clients, the Sama divers and the Tausug merchants and the Yakan farmers each with their own internal authorities — was not a single sovereignty. It was a layered, plural sovereignty of the kind the medieval Sulu polity had carried since 1417, refined and elaborated across four centuries.
When the steam gunboats arrived, they could break the Sultanate’s military arm and dismantle the export economy. They could not break the layered structure of sovereignties beneath. That structure is what the next story has to reckon with.
Quarantined Claims
Applying the framework laid out in Story 1, the following claims are explicitly excluded:
- QUARANTINED: That the Sulu Zone was a “piratical” formation. The Zone was a structured maritime political-economic system with a treaty-capable sovereign at its apex, integrated commodity chains terminating in Canton, and recognized diplomatic status with Britain and Spain. Calling it piratical inherits a colonial legal-rhetorical move (see Story 3) and obscures the actual structural reality.
- QUARANTINED: That Sulu slave-raiding was an Iranun or Balangingi cultural trait. It was an economic specialization developed in response to the labor demands of the 18th-century Canton commodity chains, with definite chronological onset, peak, and decline; it is a structural fact about a particular economic formation, not an ethnic essence.
- QUARANTINED: That captives “became slaves” in the European chattel sense. Captives entered a graduated assimilation process — language acquisition, religious conversion, marriage, eventual descendant integration — that produced a substantial portion of the Sultanate’s Tausug-speaking population over generations. The category collapse to chattel-slavery misreads the social institution.
- QUARANTINED: That the Sultanate’s late-18th to mid-19th century prosperity was an anomaly of decline. It was the Sultanate at its territorial, commercial, and political peak. The framing of this period as “decline” projects backward from the post-1848 dismantling.
- QUARANTINED: That the lived sovereignty of the Tausug, Sama-Bajau, Iranun, and Yakan peoples was identical to or fully captured by the Sultan’s legal-formal sovereignty. These are two distinct sovereignties — the apex institution and the distributed substrate — that operated together but were not coextensive. The distinction matters acutely in Story 5.
Primary sources: Captured Spanish, Dutch, and British colonial reports collected and analyzed in James F. Warren’s archival work; the Tarsila of Sulu (Saleeby translation, 1908); Sulu treaty texts with Britain (1761) and Spain (multiple, 18th century). Secondary: James F. Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State, 2nd ed. (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007 [1981]); James F. Warren, Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity (Singapore: NUS Press, 2002); Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 2 (1993); Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (2005); Cesar Adib Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973); Peter Gowing, Muslim Filipinos: Heritage and Horizon (1979); William Henry Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines (1991). Internal cross-reference: see “The Three Kings of Sulu” for the pre-Sultanate evidentiary base, and “Three Centuries of Moro Resistance” for the broader anti-colonial frame.
