Sulu's earliest inhabitants practiced animist religions, which eventually gave way to Hindu and Buddhist belief systems. The Kingdom of Lupah Sug, governed by rajahs, was established centuries before Islam arrived. The advent of Islam around 1138, carried by Arab and Persian merchants, began a slow transformation. Chinese Muslim traders participated in local commerce, and by the 14th century, trade connections with the Ming dynasty were well established. The Sulu Archipelago served as an entrepot linking southern China with the Malay world. The transition from Hindu principality to Islamic sultanate was neither sudden nor simple. It unfolded over generations, layering new political systems atop old ones, absorbing migrant peoples from Basilan, Sulawesi, Johor, and Mindanao.

Maimbung, on the southern coast of Jolo island, served as the royal capital of the Sultanate of Sulu. The capital is Jolo town today, but Maimbung retains its historical significance as the seat from which sultans directed a maritime state that stretched across the Sulu Sea to Borneo. The province was formally organized by the Americans in 1914 under the Department of Mindanao and Sulu, governed initially by Frank Carpenter. The Bates Agreement of 1899, signed between Sultan Jamalul Kiram II and Brigadier General John C. Bates, had begun the gradual erosion of sultanate authority that Spain's 1878 treaty had started. By 1915, the sultan had abdicated temporal power, though the cultural and spiritual authority of the sultanate endured.

The most devastating chapter in Sulu's modern history began in the 1970s. The Muslim Separatist Rebellion, which erupted under the Marcos regime, made Jolo its principal battleground. In 1974, the Moro National Liberation Front attempted to take the town, and the ensuing military operations reduced much of Jolo to rubble. Bombardment and fire destroyed the Spanish-era fortifications that had survived centuries of colonial warfare. Thousands of civilians were displaced. The conflict between government forces and various Moro factions would continue for decades, with the Abu Sayyaf group later establishing strongholds in the province. The human cost was enormous: poverty, displacement, and a generation raised in the shadow of violence.

Sulu's relationship with the rest of the Philippines has always been contested. The Moro National Liberation Front was granted leadership of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in 1996, and the Bangsamoro Organic Law created a new autonomous framework in 2019. But when the plebiscite was held, Sulu voted no. The province rejected inclusion in the Bangsamoro region by a simple majority, a decision the Supreme Court ultimately upheld. The ruling effectively removed Sulu from BARMM, and discussions began about potentially placing the province under the Zamboanga Peninsula administrative region instead. For the Tausug, the question has never been whether to belong to someone else's vision of governance but how to preserve their own. That question, which predates the Spanish, the Americans, and the Philippine Republic, remains unanswered.