Colonial governance operated by deliberately shaping common sense and suppressing uncommon sense.

Evidence

But what constitutes common sense is at once historical and political; colonial contexts teach us clearly that dispositions are trained and disciplined and not without deliberation. Like habitus, they are neither uniform nor uncontested. Dispositions emerge out of a habitus that is rejected, accepted, or uneasily accommodated. Dispositions are not given, they are interpretations, discerned and made. Nor were they always below the threshold of reflective surveillance. To my mind, this shaping of common sense, and the reigning in of uncommon sense, how it is taken up, is the substance of colonial governance and its working epistemologies. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 241

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Common sense is a political resource against the imposition of a ruler’s single reality. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 290