Colonial officials generated transnational social categories through anxious analogies among colonies

Evidence

Some proposals had their referents in Europe, others in the Indies, still others in colonial contexts further afield. Together they map circuits of knowledgeproduction of varied scale and unexpected breadth. Colonial officials both created and called up a set of transnational equivalencies between “their” indigent Europeans and those elsewhere. What was produced was less often viable social policy than anxious efforts to identify an elusive social category available for cross-colonial comparison. Not least, these administrative recitations bear witness to how analogies were fashioned, and how the casual narratives that tied racial membership, class belonging, and impoverishment accumulated, gained, lost, and regained credibility when they were cross-referenced and (re)stored. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 628

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reading purpose ‘epistemic anxieties and colonial commonsense.’ The fashioning and (re)storing of analogies maps onto the reader’s colonial-studies comparative framework.