Colonial governance and classical probability both aimed to tame chance through trust-based conventions.

Evidence

The epistemic practices of science and colonial governance have something else important in common: a preoccupation with the taming of chance.” Much as classical probability theory was to measure the incertitudes of a modernizing world, colonial civil servants were charged to do the same. Both ventures approach the conventions and categories of analysis as neither innocuous nor benign. As interpretive communities, both depend on rules of reliability and trust, on an assumed common sense about what was likely, that allow prediction and direct the political projects that those plausibilities serve. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 270

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Hacking’s ‘The Taming of Chance’ — the reader could cross-reference how colonial administrative probability relates to the European statistical projects Hacking describes.
• SEED: An essay contrasting the taming of chance in European statistics vs. colonial administration would be a strong comparative piece.