Why The White Rajahs Matter, and the Next Colonial History Series

Who Would You Like to Learn About Next?

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! After four in-depth articles on the History of the White Rajahs of Sarawak (click to read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV), it’s time for me to wrap things up with a word on why they matter, a review of the books used to discover their story, and an opportunity for you to vote on who the next series could cover…I have four fun ideas in mind for that, and I’d really appreciate it if you voted on which one you prefer in section three of this post. Enjoy! And as always, please like and share the article so the algorithm knows to promote it, and if you are not already a paid subscriber, please subscribe for just a few dollars to read the full story and vote on who should come next!

Why the White Rajahs?

Why should you care about the White Rajahs of Sarawak? They’re an English family that existed at their height about a century ago, conquered some muddy patch of land few have heard of, and had many character flaws—from Sir James’s indolence as a young man to Vyner’s insouciance about his patrimony—that make it hard for some to care all that deeply about them, even if they are an interesting side story.

But, I think, that misses the point. The Brooke story is not just about Sarawak, that languorous stretch of Northwest Borneo. Nor is it really about pirates: conquering Somalia so as to extirpate those behind the Captain Phillips problem¹ would be great, but wasn’t necessarily my intent with the series.

Rather, it is the lesson of what they did: if you build the right team, “you can just do things,” as the popular internet saying goes. You can take destiny into your hands and go out to do something great or interesting; better yet, if what you're doing is cool, exciting, or part of a larger vision, others will follow you to the ends of the Earth.

There will always be hurdles, not least of which now is the regulatory regime. But as shown by Erik Prince and his new involvement in the Congo,² great and exciting things seemingly out of the colonial past can still be done, if only you have the vision, courage, and will necessary to set out to do them. Sir James’s story teaches this lesson quite well, which is much needed in these grey and stifling times of inactivity.

You Can Just Do Things

Remember, when Sir James started his career, he was little more than a claret-sodden playboy from Bath with little to his credit besides a wound earned from a reckless cavalry charge in Burma and a wealth of knowledge about Sir Stamford Raffles’ attempts at empire building in the Far East. He then inherited the modern equivalent of a few million dollars—enough to avoid working but not enough to be much more than the drunken playboy he already was—and within a few years had parlayed that into an Oriental kingdom that lasted for generations, an achievement not one of his contemporaries matched.

That’s not to say it was easy: settling the disputes of squabbling, backstabbing Malays while fighting with a cutlass against pirates in their warboats and headhunters deep in the jungle is many things, but not easy. Still, he did it without ever asking explicit permission from a government that would have told him to do most anything but. He bought the right tools (an armed yacht with rights attached to it that falsely hinted he was an agent of the government), found crew members who were happy enough to participate in an adventure, and set out to do something exciting with little real plan in mind.

Once in Sarawak, he sensed opportunity and grabbed it nearly immediately. He assisted in putting down the revolt, roped in the Royal Navy, always made sure to have some document claiming what he was doing was legal, and generally just got away with anything he could while tromping towards his vague vision of becoming notable. And he succeeded in it! No one else wanted to deal with Sarawak, other than his newfound friend Captain Keppel in the Royal Navy. However, cleaning out the pirates needed doing, so Sir James found a way to do it (bringing Western technology and morale to an uncivilized squabble) and became a rajah in the process.³

There were mistakes, of course. His unnecessary spats with a friendly British government in the 1850s were a mistake, his character flaws had a nasty tendency toward shining through more after the smallpox episode, and his breakdown in the face of Chinese treachery nearly doomed the project. But, still, he persevered and succeeded. As a result, he put his nephew Charles in a position to fulfill the original dream of liberating the natives from poverty and headhunting while turning Kuching into a thriving, modern city.⁴

That story is fun, exciting, and inspiring. There’s a reason why Sir James was a famous figure amongst schoolboys back in the Victorian and Edwardian heydays of Western Civilization, that halcyon era back before the post-Great War spiritual malaise sank its hooks into our world.

Particularly, it shows that you can go out and attempt something great. Yes, it makes sense to not anger a power greater than you: there’s a reason Sir James descended upon the untrammeled Sarawak rather than Dutch Borneo. Yes, you might lose in the end: Sir James’s hero, Sir Stamford Raffles, tried taking over Java in a similar way and was forced to leave, and William Walker’s takeover of Nicaragua was ended thanks to his own character flaws shining through a bit too much.⁵ And yes, you might just fail or die: in modern times, Mike Hoare’s Seychelles Islands coup attempt and Simon Mann’s “Wonga Coup” attempt in Equatorial Guinea were both disastrous debacles. But, if you’re the type of person who dreams big, you can always just roll the dice and try…you might just win, and pass into the ranks of legend.

That lesson is more needed than ever now. The law is both all-encompassing—most people accidentally commit multiple felonies a day,⁶ and everything they want to do is illegal⁷—and completely unenforced, as shown by the chaos of our cities. That anarcho-tyranny is unideal, not least because it squelches the spirits of those who would do something great but instead waste their lives in struggling against the grey goo of bureaucracy or giving up before even starting.

While the bureaucracy was far less of a problem in Sir James’s day than ours,⁸ his story still holds a lesson for those wishing to do great things: just do them, and get what support them along the way. If you succeed, it’ll likely turn out well in the end, whatever you did to get there. That is particularly true if you solve a major problem no one else wants to solve, much as Sir James solved the pirate problem that had been intractable for decades.

Why the Lesson Matters

Doing Great Things

Elon Musk and SpaceX are a great example of why this is an important lesson: Elon’s professed goal is to settle Mars. While SpaceX needs to make money along the way to accomplish that, the goal of the company is to get humans to Mars so that they can start terraforming the Red Planet and building civilization on it. An ambitious goal, and a likely illegal one.

Namely, the Cold War-era Outer Space Treaty (OST) prohibits nations or private parties under their jurisdiction from claiming territory in space.⁹ Further, the accomplishment-hating “international law” pedants and harridans are already chastizing Elon for considering violating it;¹⁰ it would be as if Sir James’s Parliamentary woes began before he ever set sail.

So, if Elon is to fulfill his destiny and settle Mars, he will have to do so in conscious defiance of the OST, and America might¹¹ or might not support him in that.

Fortunately, much like with Sir James’s conquest of Sarawak, there are significant grey areas he could exploit,¹² and many reasons for America to support him in rejecting the egalitarian OST¹³ in favor of reaching for something greater. For example, what if SpaceX established bases on Mars and the Moon and connected them to efforts to 1) clean up the intractable space junk problem,¹⁴ and 2) mine much-needed rare-earth minerals on asteroids?

Sir James was confirmed in his position because he dealt with the pirates, held territory that could serve as a coaling station for the Royal Navy, and put a cheery, mission civilisatrice¹⁵ spin on things when he returned home to justify himself.¹⁶ Practicality aside, solving intractable problems like space junk, in-space refueling, rare earth mineral mining, and the like is the sort of accomplishment that Elon could trade in exchange for tacit acceptance of his colony’s sovereignty, assuming America is practical rather than ideologically in favor of the ridiculous OST. Plus, he already controls America’s access to space, a critical need in our new era of great power competition.

It would be difficult, and there would be issues. But, after one has “just done things,” some of them can be traded for the real want. Sir James traded constant pacification of the pirates and help for the Royal Navy in exchange for becoming the British-recognized prince of a swamp, and his heirs then built that into something glorious. Elon, if he takes the right steps along the way, could do much the same on the Red Planet rather than Sarawak.

This Applies to Minor Deeds as Well

And it is not just titanic undertakings like the settlement of a planet to which this applies, however fun and exciting that is to imagine. Perhaps we’ll make it to Mars if we break free of the equity shackles,¹⁷ but in the meantime, pursuing more achievable objectives here on Earth is the basket into which most probably ought put their eggs.

Even in that case, the Brooke story should be inspiring and freeing. You don’t need to work in some 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. fluorescent-lit, spiritual hell. As my friend Arbitrage Andy has frequently articulated, you can just start an online business and provide value that wouldn’t exist in your absence in exchange for a living. You can just do things, like start an online business,¹⁸ and build a prosperous and independent life for yourself.

Sir James was no good as a merchant and hated the daily grind of working, but that is what he wanted. It wasn’t vast riches—he had enough of that—nor was it the torpor of a life of luxurious indolence—he grew tired of that when his wound foisted it on him. What he wanted was excitement and independence, and because he went ahead and tried, he got it. Yes, a princedom is more exciting than a Shopify store. But everyone starts somewhere, and the quest for independence through being a self-starter is freeing in all the best ways. Being your own boss, learning how the spiritual shackles fall off when you learn that you can be independent, and all the rest comes with an entrepreneurial life. So, it’s worth thinking about how you can apply the story of Sir James to your life: most have ways they could become independent, if they work up the courage to try it out.

While I hate talking about myself, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this is what I did: while in law school, I realized that being some corporate drone of a lawyer was no life to live, and likely to be unprofitable at that given technological change. So, quite to the skepticism of a few people close to me, I spent most of my hours starting a digital marketing company—of which this is a branch—alongside a few business partners.¹⁹ I still made it through law school and passed the bar, but becoming independent rather than facing a life of reviewing DEI requirements or tax code changes was my goal, and a few years of hard work led to my achieving it.

I think stories like that are important. Yes, DEI and all the rest is absolutely awful, and you should detest those who inflict it upon you. But the solution is not to just whine about them and point out the problems. It’s to build a way around that, in the hope that you can build a life at least mostly independent of the great evils and problems of our time, and draw away resources from those evils so that they whither on the vine. Or, if you don’t see things in such grandiose terms, at the very least, you don’t have to ask another grown man for permission to go watch your kid’s t-ball game. Either way, building an independent life is a great thing, and Sir James’s tale is an inspiring one that shows just how great such a life can become.

A Life of Heroism

The other reason the Sarawak lesson is important is that it’s a heroic tale, and we need more of those. Too much of our fiction is turned into some moralistic tale about being a Diverse Hero who fights racism, a girl boss who stands up to her traditionalist parents, or some similarly subversive and mundane story that never should have made it into print. History, sadly, has been appropriated by the same types and turned into the same thing: a pedantic and childish tale in support of the present morality.

The story of the Brooke dynasty is quite the opposite of that. All three of the white rajahs were flawed men, though Sir James and Charles had more redeeming characteristics than Charles. All, however, still led exciting lives of the sort that every schoolboy loves reading and their successful actions teach proper virtues—courage, paternalism, honor—that are rarely taught well anymore.

So, the Brooke tale is a fantastic story for young men, as it teaches values we need to inculcate without being pedantic. Hopefully, it will encourage the leading men of the future to do something independent and exciting while teaching them the gentlemanly virtues to bear in mind as they do so. Even if not, it’s a delightful tale of English excellence.

The Sources I Consulted: A Brief Review

There were six main books I relied upon for the four-part series, 4 of them heavily, and two more as background. I’ll briefly discuss them below in the ranking of how good I found them.

1. The White Rajahs: A History of Sarawak from 1841 to 1946 by Steven Runciman: This book is fantastic. Runciman, a historian best known for his three-volume history of the crusades, was tasked by the government of Sarawak with writing a history of the White Rajahs. While not an official history, it’s as close as the rajahs came to anything of that sort and is supported by the full Sarawak historical archives. Runciman is a fantastic writer and managed to keep his liberal politics out of this concise work, making it fantastic. The story flows well, the exciting parts are emphasized without being exaggerated, the rajahs are portrayed fairly rather than as demigods or demons, and a great deal of information that’s either left out of the other sources or underemphasized in them receives its proper due in this one.

2. The White Rajahs of Sarawak by Robert Payne: While not a historical tour de force like Runciman’s telling of the White Rajahs’ story, Payne’s rendition is similarly well-written and fun to read. It tells the tale of all three rajahs well, includes a good bit of supplementary information on their financial dealings—particularly under the later part of Charles’s reign and first decade of Vyner’s—that I found quite interesting, and does a good job of putting the Brooke accomplishments in the context of Sir James’s abhorrence of the East India Company and goals for his own colonial adventure. Further, Payne does a good job of contrasting the personalities of each rajah and describing what impact those virtues, quirks, and flaws had upon their rule.

3. Flashman’s Lady by George MacDonald Fraser: For those who haven’t read the Flashman Papers books, you really ought to do so. They are extremely entertaining and irreverent historical fiction that captures the spirit of early Victorian Britain well. In this book, one of the chronologically early tales in the series, Flashman has a lengthy run-in with Sir James and helps him fight pirates. The storyline is quite entertaining, but Frasier, an officer in Burma during World War II and amateur historian, also shows Sir James’s character well. He shows the romance and adventure of fighting the pirates, the less-than-ideal conditions on the ground in Sarawak, Sir James’s remarkable nature, and the generally peculiar nature of his little kingdom centered around Kuching, with its mix of English luxury and austere colonial conditions. All in all, it’s a fantastic book, and the one that introduced me to the story of Sir James.

4. Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism by Phillip Stern: While the above three books are excellent, Empire, Inc. is where the flaws start. It’s not a bad book: Stern delivers to the reader a very detailed and seemingly accurate analysis of the financial history of the companies that created the British Empire, from the famous British East India Company and British South Africa Company to the somewhat unknown Borneo Company Limited. As he is the only author I found who delved in depth into the story of the Borneo Company Ltd., an integral component of Brooke rule and their development of Sarawak, I found the sections on it quite helpful in thinking about the story of Brooke rule and the prosperity it brought over time. However, Stern’s writing is often tedious, and his leftist political views of empire repeatedly shine through, making the book’s criticisms of the various companies seem somewhat disingenuous. So, if you are quite interested in the private side of imperial development, this is a book worth reading. If you prefer entertaining stories, I’d avoid it like the plague.

5. The Life of Sir James Brooke by Spencer St. John: This book is interesting in that one of Sir James’s closest contemporaries and longtime assistants in Sarawak wrote it, and it is generally positive about him while containing a plethora of insider insights on the first white rajah. But its informativeness is the death of it: whereas Runciman, Fraser, and Payne kept the story of the man who slew pirates by the thousands to become an Oriental prince as exciting as it deserves to be, St. John’s telling of the story devolves into tedium. As one review put it: “It might have been thought a difficult feat to make the story of Rajah Brooke—a story as full of strange adventure, sudden turns of fortune, and thrilling incidents as any ever conceived by the most imaginative of fictionists—dry, prosaic, and uninteresting in the telling: but this feat Mr St. John has successfully accomplished. The art of word painting is not his.” That is, if anything, overgenerous. Despite being about a great adventurer, the book will bore even an interested reader nearly to tears.

6. White Rajah: A Biography of Sir James Brooke by Nigel Barley: This book is by far the worst of the bunch. Its one redeeming feature is that it tells the stories told in the other works simply enough that brief blurbs can be quoted from to show a point, as I did in the early articles on Sir James. Otherwise, however, it is awful. The writing is dry, the level of detail far worse than Payne’s, and the author fixates on Sir James’s personal relationships with the young men he tutored, attempting to paint nearly all of them as pederasty. In reality, it simply appears that Sir James preferred the social company of men to that of women. He fathered a bastard son while in Bath, had an attempt at marriage go wrong, and then devoted himself to conquering an Oriental kingdom. By the time that was done, he was aged and struck up a friendship rather than a marriage with the widowed Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Barley, however, dissects every case of Sir James hiring young Englishmen to serve as administrators in Sarawak and presents nearly all of them as cases of pederasty, which is absurd. Such a thing would not have gone unremarked upon, nor would the other homosexual relationships Barley accuses Sir James of having have gone unnoticed. It’s simply unbelievable and ruins the book, as nearly every other page is some accusation of improper conduct—claims that Runciman and Payne discredit or ignore as beyond unbelievable. Avoid this one like the plague.

Which Hero Should I Cover Next?

Now that the story of the White Rajahs is over, I need to research and write about another colonial hero. Before I embark upon that, I’d like your input. I had a few ideas in mind, so I’ll describe them here, and then include a poll where you can vote on who you think should be next. If you have someone else in mind, please just leave a comment with your suggestion and I’ll look into it.

1. “Mad Mike” Hoare, the Congo Mercenary

Much as Sir James was one of the great adventurers in the days of colonialism, Mike Hoare was one of the great mercenaries of the decolonization period. An Englishman who fought in WWII and grew tired of normal work after the war, he fought the Congolese government and UN during the Katanga Secession crisis, fought the Simba rebels to save nuns and Congolese villagers during the Simba Rebellion, explored Southern Africa, and launched a coup in the Seychelles Islands with the help of the South African government.

He’s a controversial hero with a great deal of accomplishment under his belt, and his story shows the chaos of decolonization quite well.

2. Sir Stamford Raffles, Adventurer and Founder of British Singapore

While Hoare is a man about whom I already know a good bit, Sir Raffles is one I only heard about through the story of Sir James Brooke. I suspect many only vaguely know who he is, if at all. That is unfortunate, as he is another titan of the colonial age. He conquered Java for the British and almost set up personal, sovereign rule in Borneo like that of Sir James a few decades later. He founded modern Singapore, brought just rule (such as by outlawing forced labor) to Britain’s Far Eastern colonies, and otherwise quite acted like Sir James and his heirs.

As Sir Stamford was also a swashbuckling colonial adventurer, reformer, and founder of successful Far Eastern polities, he could make a fun follow-up to the history of Sir James.

3. Eeben Barlow, The Last Great African Mercenary

If “Mad Mike” was the characteristic White Mercenary in Black Africa of the decolonization days, Eeben Barlow is the characteristic modern mercenary. He founded Executive Outcomes—the first of the modern “private military contractor” firms and the one that inspired Erik Prince’s Blackwater—and used it to crush rebellions in Angola and Sierra Leone. Predictably, his success brought him the scorn of the “international community,” and Executive Outcomes was broken up by the Mandela regime after being forced out of Sierra Leone.

Barlow shows what can be accomplished in these modern times, what the troubles and holdups are, how Africa could be fixed, and how quickly the South African regime became terrible.

4. Courtney Selous, Rhodesian Founder and Hunter Extraordinaire

Last but not least is Courtney Selous, the heroic hunter and adventurer who in real life helped found Rhodesia and in fiction helped inspire H. Rider Haggard’s Alan Quartermaine. I know much less about Mr. Selous than I would like, and suspect that there are a great many fun and exciting tales in his life that would make for fun reading. Further, his story is intertwined with the early history of Rhodesia, a subject near and dear to my heart.

So, if you’d like to vote on who should be next up in the series, I’d really appreciate it if you voted in the poll (for paid subscribers, as full access to these stories is the benefit one gets of being a paid sub):

Thanks for reading, thanks for subscribing, and thanks for sticking through to the end of the story! I can’t wait to start working on the next one!

P.S.: Here are two more polls on this sort of content for those who read to the end and are interested in the Brooke story:

If you found value in this article, please consider liking it using the button below, and upgrading to become a paid subscriber. That subscriber revenue supports the project and gets you full access to long-form articles like those on the Brooke dynasty!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maersk_Alabama_hijacking

2. https://www.theafricareport.com/381915/erik-prince-returns-to-the-drc-amid-us-mineral-security-push/

3. This story told here:

4. Read how Charles accomplished this here:

5. If you haven’t read the story of William Walker, it’s quite fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Walker_(filibuster)

This is an exciting read on his war for Nicaragua: Tycoon's War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America's Most Famous Military Adventurer

6. https://www.econlib.org/three-felonies-a-day/

The book on this: Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent

7. This situation is described well in this book: Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front

8. Bureaucratic tyranny:

9. https://journals.law.harvard.edu/ilj/2025/04/tomorrow-for-which-we-are-not-prepared-why-is-the-outer-space-treaty-opposed-to-the-idea-of-colonizing-mars/#:~:text=Colonization%20of%20Mars%2C%20by%20its,conflict%20with%20the%20Article's%20text.

10. https://thebulletin.org/2025/03/mars-attacks-how-elon-musks-plans-to-colonize-mars-threaten-earth/

https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/sorry-elon-mars-is-not-a-legal-vacuum-and-its-not-yours-either/

11. https://www.fletcherforum.org/the-rostrum/2020/5/13/xivuszey4u0y9jsbi360vfmz1lixrn

12. https://www.baynelaw.com/blog/2024/08/balancing-private-space-exploration-and-international-law-lessons-from-history/

13. As with most remnants of the 20th century, the OST is essentially egalitarian in intent and form: https://www.fletcherforum.org/the-rostrum/2020/5/13/xivuszey4u0y9jsbi360vfmz1lixrn

14. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/analysis-why-trash-in-space-is-a-major-problem-with-no-clear-fix

15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilizing_mission

16. Described here:

17.

18. How to Start an Online Business

19. Some of that story told here: