Colonial officials suppressed reports by disputing statistics they themselves could not verify

Evidence

The Minister of Colonies, I. D. Fransen van den Putte, conservative and highly protective of state interests and funds, thought otherwise. On reading the report, he not only forbade its publication. He criticized nearly every recommendation made, accusing the commission of placing all blame on the government. His advisory board, the Raad van Indië, did not uphold his position, instead concluding that “a huge number of descendants of Europeans [were] drudging through miserable lives with no means of existence.” He ignored their conclusion and questioned the claim. With a lack of statistics, he quipped, what did the commission really know about the livelihoods of the nearly 8,000 Indies-born Europeans that only Commissioner King had bothered to mention? (The fact that Van den Putte’s figure was a good 1,500 people more than Commissioner King’s was an artifact of the problem with the category itself and who was included in it.) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 849

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘artifact of the category itself’ point directly echoes the reader’s epistemic anxieties/colonial commonsense focus — statistical disputes reveal the unstable category of ‘European’ in the Indies.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘when numbers are used to silence’ — how officials weaponized statistical uncertainty to foreclose findings they disliked, and how category instability enables that move.