Colonial fears of revolt existed independent of any actual rebellion

Evidence

The fact that they led no revolts and produced no martyrs to their cause had little bearing on the highpitched fears that eddied around them. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, intense debates about what was conceived as the repressed rage of Inlandsche kinderen point elsewhere: to what Doris Sommer in another context calls the “foundational fictions” of colonial rule. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 58

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels moral-panic scholarship where the absence of real threat fails to temper elite panic — echoes Cohen’s moral panic frame.