Colonial Europeans resented pauperism surveys that exposed low-ranking officials’ own poverty

Evidence

As the commission itself realized, the investigation was very “unpopular” among “many” European residents: “the Indo-European population in the Indies” was “especially” uneasy and “suspicious” of the inquiries. And authorities were convinced that the press, and those like Knaap, made it worse. Nor were those most needy necessarily the most offended. More embarrassing to all, and especially to the ruling elite, were the numbers of subaltern civil servants in government offices whose own incomes were lower than the level at which pauperism was said to start. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 922