Colonial industrial policy imagined class-making from the mixed-blood poor

Evidence

An “industrial romance” complemented and competed with the first. Promoted in the 1860s and 1870s, its advocates called for the making of an industrial labor force from an unskilled, illiterate poor white–mixed blood class. Here, Indies-born sons would become the new “subordinate technical personnel” for a modernizing colony, a labor aristocracy armed with limited European practical training and a selective local knowledge. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 644