Colonial officials feared mixed-race civil servants as a destabilizing class

Evidence

Still more disturbing to him were increasing numbers of “coloreds” so “reduced to poverty they could only hope for a change and had nothing to lose.” Here was a population, he argued, growing in proportion to the number of Europeans, and potentially dangerous given the increased scientific knowledge available to them. Discontent with regard to the lowranking civil service posts they had long occupied and considered their own, they now saw even those positions threatened by more Dutch youths coming to Java. These “colored,” Rochussen insisted, were despised by natives and Europeans, but what most marked them was something else: They were people who were deprived in their youth of parental love, nameless or with names that branded them as illegitimately born, and with their hearts and souls full of hate for Europeans.” Nor did the Governor- General miss the fact that, among those most resented by the illegitimately born and abandoned, were their own fathers. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 560

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes classic colonial anxieties about métis/Indo populations found in other colonial histories — a demographic fear distinct from native revolt.
• STORYSTEM: The figure of the illegitimate mixed-race clerk whose social world is structured by resentment of his European colonial fathers is a strong character seed for a colonial-era novel.