A History of Brunei is the first full-length study of the Brunei Sultanate from the earliest times to the present. Based on recent research and the writings of European and Bruneian scholars, it traces the history of the state, and its line of rulers from their pre-Islamic origins.

Controversies, over the antecedents of the Brunei state, the date of the conversion to Islam, the reigns of the early Sultans, the Spanish attack of 1578, and the troubled decades of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are elucidated, if not resolved. Brunei's decline under pressure from the Brookes of Sarawak and the British North Borneo Company was arrested by the obstinacy of Sultan Hashim and the creation of a British Residency in 1906. The twentieth century has seen economic recovery fuelled by the discovery of oil, the Japanese Occupation, the growth of political consciousness, and crises associated with the Brunei Revolt of 1962 and the creation of Malaysia in 1963.

Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin III preserved the absolute monarchy and links with Britain as Brunei grew wealthy on the exploitation of oil and natural gas. The story ends with the attainment of full independence in 1984 and a survey of the reign since then of Sultan Sir Hassanal Bolkiah, who celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his coronation in 1993.

1. The author taught in Brunei from 1970 and was Head of the History Department, Maktab Duli Pengiran Muda Al-Muhtadee Billah, Brunei Darussalam, from 1981 to 1991.