Colonial officials could not distinguish which social segment actually threatened their rule

Evidence

But who and what comprised the threat was not clear, certainly not in Governor-General Rochussen’s letter to Baud four days after the gathering: was there subversion among the well-to-do, European-born city fathers, led by liberals like Van Hoëvell, or among the more extreme “hotheads” who stayed on at de Harmonie that night after the bulk of the crowd had retired? Was it a creole uprising among the Indies-born and - bred Europeans or a seditious bid to break off from the Netherlands by destitute “coloreds” with nothing to lose? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 524

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s framing interest in epistemic anxieties — the colonial state’s fear is intensified precisely because it cannot locate the threat in its own racialized social map.