SEMINAR: Asian Studies Seminar

This paper is a topical investigation into how the relationship between the unpredictable power of nature and the rise of the Iranun, as long –distance saltwater slavers, changed the course of Southeast Asian History. It attempts to illuminate the imponderable effects of a volcanic eruption on a people and the history of a region. Too little is known about the extraordinary history of the eruption of the Macaturin Volcano in 1765-the most devastating explosion in centuries-and the remarkable events that occurred over the next several decades in Mindanao, the Sulu archipelago and north Borneo, including harvest failure, famine, social dislocation, and displacement triggered by environmental risk. The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct, so far as I am able, what actually happened to the Iranun /Maranao people of the Rio Grande valley in the period 1765-1790, and, to try and make a balanced assessment concerning the probable links between the cataclysmic eruption of the Macaturin Volcano and its social and material impacts upon the Iranun/Maranao, who had lived under the shadow of the volcano. The Iranun dramatic expansion west across Southeast Asia and south to the fabled spice islands in the 1780s and 1790s is still poorly understood. What made the Iranun leave their homeland in southwestern Mindanao? When and why were the Iranun settlements in the Philippines ,Indonesia and Malaysia established? These refugees turned raiders regularly travelled further than most Southeast Asians had ever gone before and established a vast network of bases and communications over great distances. Such events marked the beginning of the period known to Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century as the Iranun Age. The paper will attempt to show how the fate of the Iranun was decided in large measure by the uncontrollable power of nature . While the events of displacement surrounding the 1765 Macaturin eruption subsequently had far reaching- often terrifying- effects upon the coastal populations of Southeast Asia, and the course of regional history.