Colonial commissions replaced poverty with race as their core concern

Evidence

In the Netherlands the first such commission of 1815 launched a flood of commissions that followed. In Britain the Poor Law Commission of 1834 provided the template for 74 more such inquiries in the 1850s alone. If Jeremy Bentham’s dictum, “banish poverty, you banish wealth,” captured the moral calculus of this commission-making impulse—devoted to sharply distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor—in the colonial heartlands of empire, such as Java, the emphasis was elsewhere. Bentham’s warning, as the two preceding chapters should make clear, might easily have read: “Banish race, you banish wealth.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 814

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to chapter’s own repeated theme of race replacing class analysis in colonial governance.
• QUESTION: When exactly did the shift from poverty-framed to race-framed inquiry happen in the Dutch Indies, and what localized it?