Colonial census categories could define away inconvenient poverty by racial reclassification

Evidence

Finally, he rightly predicted what the gentlemen commissioners would conclude: that there really was no white pauperism in the rich colony because those counted as needy were not really European. As he snidely put it, “Mountains of paper will be filled to the profit of the paper factories in the Netherlands.” There would be lots of documents, but no results. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 940

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to colonial archival studies—how the categories written into documents produce the reality they appear to describe. — connects to: Racial nativists reframed discrimination as equal justice to justify the 1890 census base — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1926
• CANDY: The ‘mountains of paper filled to the profit of the paper factories’ barb is a quotable colonial-waste one-liner.