Colonial child-rearing debates continued long-running European theories of how affect forms

Evidence

Dutch authorities never agreed how on to cultivate European sensibilities in their young, and just how early in a child’s development they imagined they needed to do so. But as a broader history of child rearing would show, these were not idiosyncratic colonial concerns. Seventeenth-century philosophers, eighteenth-century medical experts, and nineteenth-century purveyors of domestic science harped on the same set of questions: whether affective dispositions were filtered through a wet nurse’s milk, the tone of a lullaby, or in the moral makeup of a pregnant mother. In the nineteenth-century Indies, too, colonial coffers, time, and energy were expended on devising education and social policy that would provide their own children and those of their creole counterparts with proper “feelings” and “attachments” to things Dutch and imbue them with a “disaffection” for that which was native—or preferably a disinterested sympathy for it. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 598

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to history of childhood and domestic science literature, and to wet-nurse debates in European medical history.