thesis

The Forked Sovereignty Thesis

The Sulu Sultanate's sovereignty was always layered: a legal-formal apex (the Sultan, the court, treaty-making capacity) layered onto a substrate of distributed community sovereignty (datus, kin-groups, customary law, religious life). Colonial powers consistently attacked the apex and consistently mistook the apex for the whole. The 1915 Carpenter Agreement terminated the apex; the substrate was never on the table to surrender and continues to operate to the present.