Colonial authorities publicly threatened force while privately issuing differing orders by race

Evidence

As a demonstration of force, the spectacle was geared to Europeans inside the city and to the wider Javanese and Chinese populations imagined to be watching from within and outside the city’s borders. What he did not make public were the two very explicit and detailed orders he gave to the Military Commander to be executed at eight o’clock that evening: the first was that, under no circumstances, should the troops fire upon the demonstrators “other than in a situation of great distress and increasing danger,” and only then “after three warnings”; the second, contingent upon “disorder and insurrection” in the old city, permitted the artillery “to turn against them and to fire until quiet and order was restored.” Rowdy Europeans were to be arrested. Rowdy Javanese and Chinese were to be shot. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 487

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls the Standing directives theme of ‘small acts of decorum toward corpses matter more than practical logic’ and the reader’s interest in colonial archival epistemic anxieties - the divergence between public spectacle and private orders mirrors how colonial archives encode racial hierarchies.
• DEEPTHINKING: The two-tier logic - public martial display calculated for an imagined multi-racial audience, private orders differentiating arrest versus shooting by race - captures something dense about how colonial performative violence and actual policy operated on separate planes.