A shared European term ‘pauperism’ meant opposite things in Holland and in the Indies.

Evidence

The term “pauperism” had wide currency in Europe: first in England, in France after 1815, and in the Netherlands a few decades later. Histori- ans concerned with the pauper class in Holland hold that there the term connoted a “covert danger” and a social plague, an ambivalent sense of compassion and disgust for those impoverished. Used in the Netherlands to emphasize “the social responsibilities and financial burdens associated with the presence of enormous numbers of poor people in their midst,” in the Indies it signaled the reverse. If the lexicon was shared, as we have seen, the solutions were not. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 980

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: This lexical divergence echoes the book’s larger theme of epistemic anxiety: shared categories carrying inverted moral weight across colonial settings.

Related

• The same social term shifted meaning radically between metropole and colony (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial pauperism differed from European because it measured ruler-ruled distance (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial pauperism cannot be studied from above but only by insider observers (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Colonial pauperism differed from European because it measured ruler-ruled distance #qualifies (0.70)
• Epistemic confusion itself characterized colonial governance across the Indies #complicates (0.50)