The North Borneo Chartered Company (NBCC), also known as the British North Borneo Company (BNBC) was a British chartered company formed on 1 November 1881 to administer and exploit the resources of North Borneo (present-day Sabah in Malaysia). The territory became a protectorate of the British Empire in 1888 but the company remained involved with the territory until 1946, when administration was fully assumed by the Crown colony government.
The company also temporarily administered the island of Labuan in 1890 before it became part of the Straits Settlements. The company motto was Pergo et Perago, which means "I persevere and I achieve" in Latin. Its founder and first chairman was Alfred Dent.
History
Foundation
The company was founded along similar lines as the British East India Company. German businessman and diplomat Baron von Overbeck, along with the heads of a British trading company in Shanghai and London, Alfred Dent and Edward Dent, together met with the thalassocratic rulers of the northern Borneo area to obtain a concession for their colonial interests. The governor of Labuan, a British colonial island off Brunei, accompanied the negotiations. On 29 December 1877, they met Abdul Momin, Sultan of Brunei. The Sultan agreed to make the concession for 15,000 Spanish dollars. However, since it turned out that the Sultan of Brunei had already ceded some areas to the Sultan of Sulu, further negotiations were needed. With the assistance of William Clark Cowie, a Scottish adventurer and friend of Sultan Jamal-ul Azam of Sulu, the Sultan signed a concession treaty on 22 January 1878 and received 5,000 Spanish dollars.
Following the successful concessions, Overbeck and the Dent brothers became the rulers of an area in northern Borneo. Overbeck withdrew in 1879 after failing to attract the interest of his country, leaving Alfred Dent to manage the territory. Dent then planned to register a company to represent the British but since a considerably delay seemed likely, he decided to found a provisional company first. In 1881, the British North Borneo Provisional Association Limited was founded with registered capital of £300,000. The directors were Dent himself together with Rutherford Alcock, Richard Biddulph Martin, Admiral Richard Mayne and William Henry Read. The charter contract for a company with a capital of two million pounds was sealed on 1 November 1881.
The provisional company was thus dissolved and the following year, a chartered company was established with a first settlement on Gaya Island. The settlement however was burnt down during a raid by a local leader named Mat Salleh and was never re-established. Due to such resistance, establishing law and order as well as recruiting Sikh policemen from northern India became one of the company's earlies priorities, along with expanding trade; instituting a government, courts, and penal system; building a railway line from Jesselton to Tenom; and encouraging the harvesting and barter trade of local crops, as well as establishment of plantations. The company also faced some resistance to its economic modernisations and tax policies.
Dissolution
No other state in the British Commonwealth was as devastated by the Second World War as North Borneo. By the end of the war, it was already foreseeable that the company would be unable to finance remediation for the devastation to land and infrastructure. The company therefore waived the further use of their charter and gave British North Borneo to the British Colonial Office. With the signing of an agreement on 26 June 1946, the company officially dissolved. From 15 July 1946 until the formation of Malaysia on 16 September 1963, North Borneo was a Crown colony. The agreement with the British government included a £860,000 immediate cash settlement that allowed the company to settle outstanding financial claims. The government's offer to repay all other claims by paying 2.2 million pounds had already been rejected by the company. For the negotiation of further financial compensation, the British government appointed Lord Uthwatt as an independent arbitrator. In March 1949, Uthwatt announced the result of his investigations: £1,400,000 should be awarded to the company as compensation; any claims related to war damage would not be included. The news triggered a bitter disappointment among shareholders. In just overnight, the value of the company share fell from 17s to 9s 6p.