Colonial agrarian policy projected the metropole’s lost yeomanry onto the colony

Evidence

A “rural romance” prevailed over a longer period and was at once the most nostalgic, the most utopian, and the most embattled of all. Here was envisioned a return to the land for those who had never lived upon it, a reclamation of a mode of existence that might forge a new settler colonialism out of those who were not really “settlers” but born in the colony and considered only “quasi-European.” At its heart was the fantasy of a placated and placid population of small-scale truck farmers, living off a modest but productive agrarian base. The vision was for the Indies but its nostalgia and yearnings were not. In part, its referent was the Netherlands, where an extensive landed yeomanry was in attrition and such a way of life becoming less possible. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 646

Categorization

• XREF: The recursion of nostalgia onto a colonial future echoes the author’s ‘Grafting & Growth’ essay theme of transporting imagined past forms into new terrain; also connects to settler colonialism scholarship.
• SEED: Potential article angle: how colonial planners repeatedly used the metropole’s dying social forms as templates for the colony, transferring loss rather than innovation.