Colonial inquiry commissions treated domestic intimacies as state security data

Evidence

This was a politics of comparison in which biopolitical assessments of differential racial capabilities and character were key features of social technology. Those commissions, like the European Pauperism Commission or the South African Carnegie Commission on Poor Whites thirty years later, explicitly linked domestic relationships—between parent and child, nursemaid and infant—to the security of the state. Relations between people and objects—to clothing, furnishings, room arrangements, and window-openings—were invoked, as well. Eyewitness testimonies to intimacies of the home had become data of a particular kind, critical to the state’s audit of its commitment to the public good, to racial differentiation, and to its own viability. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 187

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s colonial archives focus — domestic space as a site of imperial audit resembles Foucault’s biopolitics and the Poor Laws lineage.