Colonial officials produced hundreds of conflicting accounts of Sumatra violence

Evidence

Within a period of several months, Valck and other Dutch civil servants, military personnel, and European planters partook in hundreds of official exchanges, expressing their own versions of what was causing arson, robbery, and murder on Sumatra’s East Coast. Their discrepant accounts stand in relief against their common sources. Was the Luhmann murder an isolated incident or, as Valck contended, part of a patterned response to European abuse? The identity of the assailants was far from clear. Were they ethnic Gayo woodcutters or Javanese estate workers, were they estate workers set on revenge against their employer or guerilla supporters of the ongoing Aceh War to the north? Was Luhmann the object of their wrath or the hapless victim of a random assault on planters or on Europeans? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1030