Precolonial Cotabato and European Mercantile Expansion
In his watershed work, Europe and the People without History , Eric Wolf cautions that the operation of a tributary mode of production in any particular state is "at least in part determined by whether that state is weak or strong in relation to other polities . . . Successful surplus extraction cannot be understood in terms of an isolated society alone; rather, it is a function of the changing organization of the wider field of power within which the particular tributary constellation is located" (1982, 82). The proposition that power relations between societies have a determining influence on local political-economic orders is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the Cotabato sultanates. Within decades of their establishment (which occurred most probably in the first half of the sixteenth century), the Cotabato sultanates began to feel the severe effects of the intrusion of European powers into the region. The most intense collisions were with the Spaniards, who occupied the northern Philippines in 1571 and almost immediately sought to subdue the Muslim South. The first three Spanish military expeditions against Cotabato were failures. On the third, in 1596, the commander of the expedition was slain and the Spaniards forced eventually to abandon the fort that had been their foothold in Cotabato. Before doing so, the acting commander reportedly "cut down or set fire to all the coconut and sago palms within reach of his patrols, to the number of 50,000 trees" (de la Costa 1961, 279), a tactic foreshadowing the economic strangulation to be applied to Cotabato in place of direct armed assault.[22]
The Spaniards withdrew to Zamboanga where they established a garrison at the tip of the Zamboanga Peninsula in order to control the sea lanes leading to and from Cotabato. The Spanish fort commanded the channel between the peninsula and the island of Basilan, the normal route of sea travel between Cotabato and the rest of the archipelago. Patrol boats based at the fort rerouted Chinese junks coming from the north bound for Cotabato. When manned, the fort was quite effective in impeding the direct China-Cotabato trade. It was much less successful at curtailing maritime raiding. Iranun marauders easily eluded Spanish patrol boats in the Basilan Straits to raid throughout insular Southeast Asia, with the Spanish Philippines becoming their preferred destination. By the mid-eighteenth century, Spanish colonial authorities had largely disarmed the Philippine populations subject to Spanish rule but had not provided them with adequate coastal defense forces. The Iranun responded to those changed circumstances opportunistically, launching annual slave raids against the Spanish North that rarely met with significant armed resistance.
The power and prestige of the Cotabato sultanates intensified during the periods when the Zamboanga garrison was abandoned (1599–1635, 1663–1718) and subsided when the blockade was reestablished. In the first part of the seventeenth century the China trade flourished in Cotabato and the political and economic might of the downriver polity—the Magindanao Sultanate—reached its peak under Sultan Kudarat. By 1775, however, Forrest was able to describe economic conditions in the Magindanao Sultanate as follows: "Spaniards have long hindered Chinese junks, bound from Amoy to Magindanao, to pass Samboangan [Zamboanga]. This is the cause of so little trade at Magindanao, no vessels sailing from Indostan thither; and the little trade is confined to a few Country Chinese . . . and a few Soolooans [Tausug] who come hither to buy rice and paly [palay , or unhusked rice], bringing with them Chinese articles: for the crop of rice at Sooloo can never be depended on" (1969 [1779], 280).
By 1800, the Magindanao Sultanate had begun an inexorable economic decline that coincided with the expansion of another Muslim polity of the South. The Sulu Sultanate encompassed the islands of the Sulu archipelago, which forms the boundary between the Sulu Sea and the Celebes Sea. Its favorable location at the juncture of several trade routes ensured its continuation as a maritime entrepôt. The Magindanao Sultanate, no longer able to obtain trade goods directly, was
now reduced to providing rice to the expanding Sulu Sultanate in exchange for Chinese goods formerly obtained directly at much more advantageous rates of exchange (Forrest 1969 [1779]). On the basis of evidence from Forrest and others, Warren (1981) suggests that, after 1780, Iranun raiders, who formerly had sailed as economic allies of Magindanao datus, began to raid independently or shift their allegiance to the Sulu Sultanate.
Spanish economic and military pressure also impinged on relations between the upriver and coastal sultanates of the Cotabato Basin. The two rival power centers alternately aligned with the Spaniards against one another as their fortunes waxed and waned. In 1605 and 1635, the Spaniards signed treaties with the reigning upriver (Buayan) sultan recognizing him as the paramount ruler of Mindanao. In 1645 and 1719, similar agreements were made acknowledging the paramountcy of the Sultan of Magindanao. In 1734, the successor to the Magindanao throne was crowned sultan by the Spaniards, and by 1837 the downriver sultanate was a virtual protectorate of the Spanish colonial domain, with the government in Manila controlling trade and choosing the successor to the sultan (Ileto 1971). The Buayan Sultanate, on the other hand, was increasing its influence during this period and annexing tributaries who had abandoned the Magindanao Sultan.
With the introduction by the Spaniards of steam-powered gunboats in 1846 to patrol the Basilan Straits, Iranun raids against the northern Philippines from liana Bay were, for the first time, effectively curtailed. This was the final blow to the economic viability of the Magindanao Sultanate. In 1861, the Spanish flag was raised without resistance over the palace of the Sultan of Magindanao, and the downstream sultanate became a colonial possession of Spain. The occupation of the Magindanao Sultanate was accomplished without bloodshed, and plans were soon underway to force the submission of the upstream polity.
The suppression of Iranun slave raiding in the Spanish Philippines coincided with an increased demand for slaves in the Sulu Sultanate to meet the labor needs associated with its recent position as a powerful commercial link in the European trade with China. In the late eighteenth century, the British East India Company was looking for a way to redress its adverse trade balance with China. In particular, it sought a means to stem the flow of silver from British India to China in exchange for the tea so highly desired in Britain. British merchants discovered the long-established Sino-Sulu trade—wherein marine and forest products were exchanged for Chinese goods—and interposed
themselves to the commercial benefit of both the Company and the Sulu Sultanate. The British provided textiles, guns, and other manufactured goods in exchange for the marine and forest products valued in China. The greatly expanded demand for these products led to the rapid growth of the Sulu Sultanate and an increased need for the recruitment of a large labor force to do the work of procurement of trade produce. This need had been met by the seasonal slave raiding conducted by the Iranun and other seagoing raiders (Warren 1981).
With slave raiding in the Spanish Philippines greatly diminished after 1846, the gap in the supply to Sulu was filled through increased raids by Cotabato Muslims on upland groups in eastern Mindanao. The Cotabato Chinese became active intermediaries in the expanded slave trade from Mindanao to Sulu (see Warren 1981; Wickberg 1965). During the 1872 smallpox epidemic and famine in Cotabato, Jesuit missionaries bought for redemption children from Chinese middlemen, who had purchased them from their Muslim owners or parents with the intention of reselling them in Sulu (Bernad 1984). An 1890 Jesuit report describes Chinese traders on the upper Pulangi purchasing slaves from slave raiders. Cotabato Chinese merchants were also involved in the gutta-percha boom of the 1880s. They exported this forest product (used as insulation in the building of the transatlantic cable) to Singapore via Sulu (Wickberg 1965). These late nineteenth-century export opportunities gave impetus to Chinese enterprise in Cotabato, and by the turn of the century the external trade of Cotabato as well as Sulu was controlled by Chinese merchants (Warren 1981).
His need for firearms to resist the Spaniards, along with his recognition of the shortage of marketable slaves for Sulu, provided Datu Utu, the last independent Sultan of Buayan, with an irresistible incentive. He and his datus ignored the centuries-old clientage arrangement between the Magindanaon and the Tiruray and began to raid them to acquire slaves to exchange for firearms. Hundreds of Tiruray were enslaved and taken to Sarangani Bay at the southern tip of Mindanao to be sold (along with rice, cacao, coffee, and forest products) to Chinese, Bornean, and European traders in return for the supplies needed to resist the Spaniards who were pushing upriver (Ileto 1971). Responding to new political exigencies and new economic opportunities, upriver datus, in the final decades of precolonial Cotabato, sold their Tiruray clients into slavery in the distant Sulu Sultanate. A combination of Spanish military pressure and British-impelled economic incentives had
produced a dramatic (if predictable) alteration of production relations between Magindanaon datus and the Tiruray, whereby collectors of commodities became themselves commodities as datus reduced former clients to chattel slaves.