Colonial craft training failed partly because Javanese and Chinese laborers undercut wages

Evidence

Of the 123 orphans sent to the Soerabaja school, only 28 made use of their specialized training: 9 became machinists, 11 were overseers, 3 worked in the military atelier, 4 became smiths, and 1 a technical engineer. Forty others became office clerks and scribes, 17 joined the military, and 10 “disappeared.” The Director of Education again blamed their aversion to manual work for the failure to make them into a laboring class (handwerksklasse). They could not compete with the sort of finetuned apprenticeship that Javanese and Chinese workers were able to attain in their “free time.” More importantly, the latter were willing to work for far lower wages. The “Indo-European manual laborer,” he concluded, “was on precarious terrain.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 748

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s broader thesis about how colonial authorities explained failure by blaming colonized populations’ ‘vanities’ rather than structural realities.