Colonial officials invoked a private-mother-care versus public-state-care boundary to block reform

Evidence

Together, the principal organizers—Van Hoëvell, Ardesch, and Cantervisscher—persuade the Governor-General that “parental feelings” and the hardship parents experienced by having to school sons afar were not “matters of state” (staatkundige zaken) but “social” issues that posed no political threat. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 473 (#expands, via linked claim)

On his arrival in the West Indies [the colonial official] experiences a shock. Here is a thoroughly civilised community, wearing the same clothes that he does, speaking no other language but his own, with its best men as good as, and only too often, better than himself. What is the effect on the colonial Englishman when he recognises, as he has to recognise, the quality of those over whom he is placed in authority? Men have to justify themselves, and he falls heavily back on the “ability of the Anglo-Saxon to govern,” “the trusteeship of the mother country until such time” (always in the distant future) “as these colonies can stand by themselves,” etc., etc. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1171 (#expands, via linked claim)

Retrospectively, Soerabaja’s craft school could be considered unrealis- tic, utopian, and doomed from the start. But “what happened” to it is less to be found in the events surrounding its openings and closings than in the distorted imaginaries of its visionaries as to the space and subjects they sought to mold. They explained away its failure as the fault of a popula- tion blocked by its own false vanities, by refusal to sit at a “carpenter’s bench” rather than a desk. But as we have seen, not everyone agreed. Van Hoëvell’s assessment in the 1850s had been correct. The school was not a “natural” disaster but made a disaster, and was pointedly undermined by state authorities. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 753 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Colonial officials permitted dissent reframed as social, not political. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonists framed parental grief as the core grievance (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial state refused welfare by delegating early childcare to mothers and private institutions (similarity 0.78)
• Casting grievances as parental feeling allowed protestors to depoliticize them before the Governor-General (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial subjects framed parental grief as social rather than political to win concessions #expands (0.50) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 473
• Colonial officials rationalized domination by claiming trusteeship over the colonized #expands (0.50) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1171
• Colonial officials blamed reform failures on indigenous vanity rather than state abandonment #complicates (0.40) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 753
• Colonial rule breaks the reciprocal relation between family and society #expands (0.30) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 230