“…As a result, Murut depopulation accelerated at an alarming rate, and by the time the next census was recorded in 1951, the Murut population had decreased by 38.3 percent (Colonial Reports: North Borneo, 1952, 1953. This article seeks to historicise the relationship between alcohol, disease and depopulation in British North Borneo, a colonial territory routinely undermined by administrative laxity, a wanton disdain for indigenous lives, and profit-minded, exploitative governance (Saunders, 2019(Saunders, & 2020. It does so by examining how in the early 1920s, shifts in the colonial plantation economy, growing patterns of internal migration, and rising mortality rates upended the status quo in indigenous agricultural communities.…”