Colonial officials could not agree on the scale of the pauper crisis

Evidence

In the 1860s local officials criticized high-government initiatives, contending that there were “not hundreds, but thousands of such children whose inclination to become an artisan class needed awakening.” Others scoffed at such a panic, estimating only a handful of dysfunctional youths that could be easily absorbed into the native milieu. By 1872 there were reports of a “staggering increase of pauperism,” tens and thousands of “embittered” paupers, scattered throughout the urban landscape, squatting in the European enclaves and miserably housed on their edges. As the Governor-General was warned in 1881, European pauperism was not new. But news of it increased within government circles and the press, which broadcasted at high volume that impoverishment was “felt more and increasing by the year.” Others painted a more sinister canvas still: an uncountable underclass spanning generations, cultural chameleons alternately seen as racial impostors, misplaced natives, disaffected Dutchmen, and defective and fictive Europeans. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 668

Categorization

• XREF: Epistemic uncertainty about population scales parallels the reader’s colonial archival-theme of contested numbers.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘uncountable underclass’ as cultural chameleons exposes the instability of colonial racial ontology itself.