A colonial government commissioned 117 investigators to study only 39 destitute Europeans

Evidence

None of this would have been so surprising if the 1872 commission had not concluded—after seven months of meetings, opinion papers, and secret reports—that there were no more than 39 Europeans in Batavia with no means of livelihood, just one-third of the number of commission- ers called on to do the investigation: 26 were in the military, 2 of whom were ranked military officials; 6 were sailors; 1 was a carpenter; 1 was a steersman; 2 were typesetters; and several were unspecified. Divided ac- cording to background, 16 were “of lowly origin,” 9 with a “good edu- cation,” and 14 substantially of “the middle class.” In all, 17 men were heavy drinkers, of which 7 were in trouble with the police: the remaining 22 gave “no immediate cause for complaint.” The figures were arbitrary, as were the categories for analysis, suggesting to some that pauperism was underestimated, to others that it was inflated, and to still others that there was something seriously flawed in the investigation. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 830

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: The absurd investigator-to-subject ratio anticipates the book’s argument that the archive accumulated around the pauperism problem far beyond its scale.

Related

• Commissioners outnumbered the destitute Europeans they investigated in 1872 Batavia. (similarity 0.92)
• Colonial statistics failed to capture the perceived status of poor Europeans (similarity 0.84)
• Secrecy requirements prevented colonial commissions from actually investigating the poor they studied (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial Europeans resented pauperism surveys that exposed low-ranking officials’ own poverty (similarity 0.82)
• The 1872 commission gathered expert testimony but never collected statistics or surveyed the poor (similarity 0.81)
• Batavia’s committee admitted the pauper statistics measured colonial status, not poverty (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial commissions relied on hearsay and common knowledge rather than investigation #contradicts (0.70)
• Secrecy requirements prevented colonial commissions from actually investigating the poor they studied #complicates (0.60) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 836
• Colonial survey data collection was uneven and often fabricated by officials #qualifies (0.50) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 911