Colonial officials imported a French prison-colony model to discipline poor mixed-race children

Evidence

The Mettray model had been invoked by colonial authorities earlier. In 1854 the Indies Advisory Council had already recommended that the Soerabaja craft school follow its lead. Mettray fulfilled colonial fantasies by several measures. It was a prison colony whose inmates would be rehabilitated through agricultural labor. Education and bodily discipline were at the center of its transformative vision of reform. Docile subjects would be the product of dociled bodies and dociled minds. Agricultural work would reshape the wayward young and the revolutionary potential of the urban poor. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 761

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the reader’s long-standing interest in Foucault’s carceral archipelago from Discipline and Punish, and connects to the reader’s broader project on colonial epistemics and disciplined subjectivity.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ and ‘On Sacrifice’ articles only tangentially; more directly feeds the reader’s core colonial archival project.