Colonial labor categories encoded fears about which classes would nurture dissent.

Evidence

Destitution was not the only concern. Some architects of colonial policy were as worried about those who were approaching the lower-middle class and the political sensibilities that might accompany that status. This was not taxonomic trivia. Different rehabilitative visions of what they could become were contingent on these varied assessments of what kinds of political sensibilities different forms of labor might nurture. Fundamental disagreement remained about how dissent and discontent might be curbed and what cross-section of this colonial underclass already harbored those inclinations. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 665

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge of how colonial classification systems (e.g., in The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s identity-policing, Things Fall Apart’s hierarchy) map political risk onto categories.
• QUESTION: Were similar anxieties about ‘approaching the lower-middle class’ present in other colonial administrations (British India, French Indochina)?

Related

• Colonial policy feared lower-middle-class political sensibilities more than destitution (similarity 0.91)
• Colonial officials’ categorical dichotomies blinded them to a spectrum of labor resistance (similarity 0.79)