Colonial officials needed non-visual epistemic methods to assess what they could not directly observe.

Evidence

I ask how people charged with large-scale management and local situations imagined they might identify what they knew they could not see, what common sense they used to assess racial belonging or political desires that were not available to ocular senses, how they distinguished politically motivated passions from private ones. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 239