External Acquisitions and the Flow of Tribute
Despite their development as rival power centers, the two principal Cotabato sultanates were linked throughout most of their history in a single economic system based on the commercial production of rice and the collection of forest products, and the external exchange of those commodities for prestige goods, firearms, and bullion.[10]
The upriver Buayan Sultanate was located in the fertile upper valley of the Pulangi. Rice was one of the primary exports from Cotabato and it is likely that the major portion of all rice exported from Cotabato was grown in the upper valley. Slave labor was centrally important to the economy of the Buayan Sultanate and much of it was prob-
ably utilized in commercial rice production. In the mid-nineteenth century, Datu Utu, the effective Sultan of Buayan and the most powerful man in the Cotabato Valley for much of his rule, was reported to have four to five thousand slaves (Gayangos cited in Ileto 1971). Lesser datus usually held fewer than one hundred slaves (Ileto 1971).
While debt-slaves almost always originated from within the domain of the sultanate, chattel slaves (banyaga) were originally acquired from outside. It is probable, because of the proximity of the Buayan Sultanate to upland areas and its relative distance from the seacoasts that were the source of slaves seized from Spanish-held territories, that most of the banyaga of the Buayan Sultanate were obtained in raids on non-Muslim upland groups.
For most of its history, however, the Buayan Sultanate did not raid its closest upland neighbors, the Tiruray, for banyaga slaves. Instead, slave hunters went farther afield to raid the Manobo of the central Cordillera or the Bilaan or T'boli of the southern Tiruray Highlands (Ileto 1971). This was because Tiruray communities had been incorporated as client groups into both sultanates. Tiruray communities entered into unequal, ritually reinforced trade relationships with individual Magindanaon datus. In exchange for Tiruray products, the datu provided salt, iron, cloth and other manufactured goods, and, just as important, protection from other datus. During his stay in Cotabato, Forrest observed profoundly unequal exchanges between Tirurays and Magindanaons. He reported loans forced on Tirurays to create permanent indebtedness and described Tirurays in their own communities being abused and treated like "slaves" by visiting Magindanaons (1969 [1779], 266).[11]
The incentive for incorporating the Tiruray into the Buayan Sultanate as clients was the value of the products the Tiruray could provide. In their upland fields the Tiruray grew tobacco, an important item for external trade, and upland rice valued by the Magindanaon for domestic consumption. Equally important were the forest products collected by the Tiruray. The mainstays of the forest product trade were beeswax, rattan, and hardwoods.[12] The Tiruray were thus critically important to datus as collectors (or, in the case of tobacco, producers) of products that could be traded externally oat great profit for highly valued Chinese goods.[13] Consequently, they were not enslaved but instead incorporated into the economic system as clients to perform this specialized role. Tiruray communities were compelled to collect forest products to meet the trade and tribute demands of
Magindanaon datus, as well as to satisfy their own consumption needs. The terms of exchange probably shifted according to changes in the external market and were constrained, on the one hand, by datus needing to avoid exploitation so extreme as to drive Tiruray communities beyond their effective reach, and, on the other, by the awareness on the part of those communities of their need for externally derived goods and the long-range capabilities of Magindanaon slave raiders.
Relations between the upriver and downriver sultanates were also centered on internal and external trade. The upriver Magindanaon were in need of the very same salt, metals, and cloth that they provided to the Tiruray. They obtained these, as well as prestige goods and bullion, in trade with the downriver sultanate. In exchange they provided rice, tobacco, forest products and, occasionally, upland banyaga slaves for domestic markets and further trading. Although external trade was sometimes carried on directly, it was more commonly channeled through the downriver sultanate. Despite periods of political tension and warfare, trade relations were always maintained, even when the downriver sultanate was occupied by the Spanish. After 1755, the river trade between the sultanates was increasingly facilitated by Chinese traders (see below).
While the upriver and downriver sultanates were similarly structured, the Magindanao Sultanate, because of its location at the river mouth, exhibited certain important differences. The Sultan of Magindanao probably had no more success than his upriver counterpart at collecting all the taxes and tribute due him from his client datus—especially those from outlying ingeds (compare Gullick 1958, 127). However, he did possess a greater number of alternative sources of revenue than did the Buayan sultan. In addition to collecting river tolls on vessels engaged in internal trade, the Sultan of Magindanao levied customs duty on arriving merchant ships and collected anchorage fees from warships.
The capital of the Magindanao Sultanate was wealthier and more cosmopolitan than that of the interior sultanate. William Dampier described the capital (located then in Simuay, just across the Pulangi River and downstream from present-day Cotabato City) in 1686 as "the chiefest City on [the] Island . . . of Mindanao" (1906, 335) and reported that Malay, the trade language of insular Southeast Asia, was spoken widely and well there.[14]
A key element in the maritime orientation of the Magindanao Sultanate was its relationship with the Iranun populations that resided
within its territory. European accounts beginning in the mid-eighteenth century identify the Iranun as specialized maritime raiders who channeled large amounts of externally acquired wealth—in the form of slaves, plunder, and occasionally external tribute—back into the sultanate (Warren 1981).[15] Swift Iranun warships set out south from Ilana Bay to harry coastal villages, merchant vessels, and Dutch settlements in Sulawesi (the Celebes) and Maluku (the Moluccas) (Warren 1981).[16] Larger Iranun raids were directed against Spanish territories in the Philippines. The coastal towns of southern Luzon and the Visayas were the victims of persistent, large-scale attacks from "Moro" sea raiders. Captives were sold externally, usually to Bugis or Brunei slave traders, or internally along the Pulangi River.[17] Spaniards or other prominent captives were usually allowed to redeem themselves by ransom immediately after their seizure (Warren 1981, 229).[18]
The Iranun occupied an important niche in the socioeconomic system of the precolonial Cotabato Basin. They formed autonomous coastal communities headed by datus or petty sultans. Although living in close proximity to the Magindanao Sultanate and often aligned with it, the Iranun were never incorporated into the sultanate as subjects, and they assiduously guarded their political independence.[19] When allied with the downriver sultan, the Iranun provided him with very significant economic and political support. The internal circulation of the wealth seized externally by Iranun raiders was also a vital component of the economic prosperity of the Magindanao Sultanate.
One nonindigenous population played a significant role in the commercial life of the precolonial Cotabato Basin. The Chinese have lived continuously in Cotabato longer than any other non-Muslim immigrant group. Chinese permanent presence in the Magindanao Sultanate almost certainly predates the Spanish occupation of the northern Philippines. Dampier found an established Chinese community in Cotabato in 1686, some of whose members worked as accountants for the sultan (1906, 364).[20] In 1755, the expulsion of most of the Chinese in the Spanish-held Philippines was carried out by colonial authorities. Some of those expelled settled in the Magindanao Sultanate (Wickberg 1965). That resettlement would account in part for the larger and more visible Chinese community described by Forrest in 1775. He reports Chinese in Cotabato working as carpenters and herbalists and operating commercial rice mills and palm wine distilleries (1969 [1779], 183, 216, 224). They were also apparently well-engaged in the intersultanate trade in local products for Chinese goods. According to
Forrest, the Chinese settled in the Magindanao Sultanate were not permitted to trade farther upriver than Buayan, the upriver capital, because the Magindanaons were "jealous of their superior abilities in trade" (1969 [1779], 185).
Despite their commercial success, the social and legal status of the Chinese in the Cotabato was precarious and certainly no better than that of the Chinese of Manila.[21] While the Chinese possessed skills and provided economic benefits to the Magindanao Sultanate comparable to those of the Iranun, their lack of political and military power tended to relegate them to the status of the Tiruray or other upland client groups.