Colonial officials fixated on subject populations they feared far more than evidence warranted

Evidence

This is not because colonial officials did not write about them. On the contrary, kings and governor generals, regional officers, and social engineers of all sorts were obsessed with their welfare, their homes, morals, speech, rearing, and resentments—and, most importantly, their vengeful and potentially subversive inclinations. The fact that they led no revolts and produced no martyrs to their cause had little bearing on the highpitched fears that eddied around them. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, intense debates about what was conceived as the repressed rage of Inlandsche kinderen point elsewhere: to what Doris Sommer in another context calls the “foundational fictions” of colonial rule. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 58

Categorization

• QUESTION: What precisely does Sommer’s foundational fictions concept lend to a reading of colonial administrative anxiety here? Worth chasing in Sommer’s work.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing interest in moral panics and epistemic anxieties in colonial settings.