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The manners and customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements.

Insufficiently flexible native governments—in this case the sultanates of Brunei and Sulu— entered into descending spirals of poverty and importance. Other European powers expressed interests in the area, increasingly as the century progressed, and Britain found her reluctance to make up her imperial mind increasingly a luxury. Even so, the upshot in northern Borneo was compromise—until 1946 the colonial halfway houses of the White Raj in Sarawak, the Chartered Company in Sabah, and a residency in the attenuated Brunei sultanate. In his conclusion, Professor Tarling stresses two late factors which made for the failure to create a single colony in northern Borneo. First, there was at the Colonial Office in the late nineteenth century a changing attitude to the methods and objectives of colonial rule. Second, there was at the same time the dogged resistance of Sultan Hashim to the complete extinction of the Brunei patrimony. Noble as these attitudes both were, in their different ways, neither affected the issue more than the consistent British (particularly Foreign Office) stance in this area, throughout the period, of expedient manoeuvre among the conflicting pressures and problems. Expediency rejected a final colonial solution in northern Borneo. Scholars of British imperial history should find interesting the manner of this tentative decision-making. Professor Tarling describes and illustrates abundantly the issues as seen by the officials and politicians in London, men who were, it transpires, on the whole shrewd, if not always in agreement and certainly not always well informed about Borneo. Those readers more concerned with specific Borneo history will also find the work useful. It provides the most detailed discussion so far, and perhaps the definitive version, of the British contexts for the dismantlement of the Brunei sultanate, the spasmodic growth of the Brooke raj, and the chartering and expansion of the Company. Nevertheless for many readers, one suspects, the book will seem to fall between two stools. While concentrating on the process of imperial policy-making, it also requires of the reader a substantial knowledge of Borneo history, geography and the personalities of the period. The reader chiefly concerned with Borneo, on the other hand, may be perturbed at the book's al215