Colonial authorities could not identify who or what threatened their rule

Evidence

But who and what comprised the threat was not clear, certainly not in Governor-General Rochussen’s letter to Baud four days after the gathering: was there subversion among the well-to-do, European-born city fathers, led by liberals like Van Hoëvell, or among the more extreme “hotheads” who stayed on at de Harmonie that night after the bulk of the crowd had retired? Was it a creole uprising among the Indies-born and - bred Europeans or a seditious bid to break off from the Netherlands by destitute “coloreds” with nothing to lose? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 524

Categorization

• QUESTION: The analytic categories here — European-born vs creole, liberal vs destitute ‘coloreds’ — seem to map onto a larger taxonomy of colonial threat that might repay further reading.