A colonial official investigated European planters torturing Chinese workers with a copy press

Evidence

Anticipating the query, Valck sets out to clarify the situation. Abruptly, he leaves off discussion of Luhmann and shifts to a diary-like chronicle of his own activities on the day in question, resituating the pertinent “context” for another story he is intent to tell … The 17th, the day of the attack on the Soengei Diski estate, I had left for Padang Boelan, in order to go to Soengei Sipoet the following morning to investigate the matter of retired artillery captain in the Indies Army, Mr. Nederveen Pieterse, who, among other things, was accused of flogging several Chinese to death, beating others with a ratan whip and using a copy press to elicit the truth when his estate had been burglarized. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1139

Categorization

• SHARE: The copy press as interrogation device — using a document-copying machine to torture confessions — is exactly the kind of grotesque archival detail a colonial-historian friend would want.