Colonial anxiety about white vagrancy expressed itself through legal debates about residence and trespass

Evidence

Although commission members claimed that the number of vagrant Europeans was insignificant, debates about legally regulating their movements suggested otherwise. The precise transgressions that were at issue were identified with circumspection, often in the guise of extended debates about what counted as trespassing, who had residency permits, and what it meant to have a “permanent residence.” Thus the commission questioned what to do with European vagrants who might stay “this week in this native kampong, the next in another” or with those “who passed the night on the front verandah of a native house?” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 867

Categorization

• QUESTION: The commission claimed numbers were insignificant yet debated regulation at length — an archival trace of unspoken worry worth exploring as a method.