Colonial commissions framed mixed-race poverty as a durable racial trait ignoring history

Evidence

The causal narrative was already evident in the historical account the commission chose to convey, one in which racial characteristics were durable and impervious to historical change. It was a story that began with the VOC in 1715 forbidding the “mixiste inboorlingen” [sic] (mixed Indies-born Europeans) from company positions; with British Governor Daendals in 1808 urging an end “to the neglect … of bastard children”; with the observation that even then, the “well-known characteristics” of the descendants of mixed bloods were present “to this day,” their “lack of mental willpower … and their inability to uplift themselves.” These were accepted as “facts of the matter” from the start. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 903

Categorization

• QUESTION: Which historical study and commission is this referring to? The Dutch East Indies context and the specific framing of mixed-blood characteristics invite digging into how the causal story was constructed.
• XREF: Parallels colonial epistemology of race in the reader’s interest area — connects to postcolonial historiography debates about how archival evidence encodes racial commonsense.