functioning as: primary political authorities, war leaders, legal adjudicators, the de facto owners of agricultural products and sea resources within a district, the primary supporters of attached craft specialists, the overseers of intra-district and external trade, and the pivotal centers of regional resource mobilization systems. Anthropologists like F. Landa Jocano and Laura Lee Junker and historians and historiographers like William Henry Scott make a careful distinction between the nobility and aristocratic nature of the datus vis a vis the exercise of sovereign political authority. Although the datus and paramount datus of early Philippine polities were a "birthright aristocracy" and were widely recognized "aristocratic" or "noble", comparable to the nobles and royals of the Spanish colonizers, the nature of their relationship with the members of their Barangay was less asymmetrical than in a monarchic political systems in other parts of the world.McCoy, Alfred W. (1983) An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines. Their control over territory was a function of their leadership of the Barangay and, in some local pre-colonial societies (mostly in Luzon), the concept of ruling was not that of "divine right." Furthermore, their position was dependent on the common consent of the members of the barangay's aristocratic Maginoo-class. Although the position of datu could be inherited, the Maginoo could decide to choose someone else to follow within their own class, if that other person proved a more capable war leader or political administrator. Even "paramount datus" such as lakans or rajahs exercised only a limited degree of influence over the less-senior datus they led, which did not include claims over the barangays and territories of these less-senior datus. Antonio de Morga, in his work Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, expounds on the degree to which early Philippine datus could exercise their authority: Paramount datus The term paramount datu or paramount ruler is a term applied by historians to describe the highest ranking political authorities in the largest lowland polities (see: Barangay state) or inter-polity alliance groups in early Philippine history, most notably those in Maynila, Tondo, the Confederation of Madja-as in Panay, Pangasinan, Cebu, Bohol, Butuan, Cotabato, and Sulu. Different cultures of the Philippine archipelago referred to the most senior datu or leader of the "barangay state" or "bayan" using different titles. In Muslim polities such as Sulu and Cotabato, the paramount ruler was called a sultan. In Tagalog communities, the equivalent title was that