Colonial laborers’ interests divided along class and landholding lines, not ethnicity

Evidence

Deli planters in the late 1870s confronted a population with disparate investments in the colonial economy; but those disparities did not divide clearly along ethnic lines. Malay sultans buttressed—and profited from— the estate industry’s incursions into their lands. By contrast, other nonlanded members of the local and immigrant groups continued to contest the labor they sold, the services they performed, and the terms of those arrangements. Most violence was directed at Europeans, but Javanese, Malays, and Bataks were alternately the targets of those who saw them as pawns and participants in the redistribution of resources that came with the widening girth of European land concessions and the attractive wages the companies promised to pay. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1204

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges neat ethnic-bloc readings of colonial resistance familiar from partition-era historiography; parallels Comaroff’s work on colonial categories.