Colonial craft training served the desires of a fantasized European elite

Evidence

This artisan class (ambachtstand) was to embody new competencies and fulfill new economic desires. To be trained as piano tuners, clockmakers, tailors, saddle makers, and cobblers, they were to service the consumption needs and the cultural distinctions of a European enclave, fecund in cultural capital and proliferating with material prosperity. The list of crafts is telling in itself. It anticipates the demands of a growing European elite and longings for acquisitions and services that the majority of the Indies’ Dutch inhabitants neither had nor would ever have the means to afford. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 641

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the theme of moral panics over consumption and class signaling in the reader’s earlier essay on Immodesty complaints.