Colonial officials used cross-regional comparison to minimize local poverty.

Evidence

Comparison is always a strategic act and a political one. Comparisons to the hardships of the destitute in the Netherlands was invoked to argue that life in the tropics made pauperism less of a hardship: “poor clothing” mattered less in the heat; bamboo huts need not keep out the cold; food was adequate if simple, in accordance with “the [native] custom.” But such refusals to acknowledge neediness sometimes flew in the face of those very statements. In Semarang the committee was appalled by Europeans living in shabby one-room hovels “that could barely fit a bed”; by windowless, dank, one-room huts with dirt floors; by a man who possessed only a raised bamboo mat (kepang) and rickety table for furniture; by an uneducated, seventeen-year-old Indo boy who “dressed as a native selling rice wine” in the local markets; by a boy of twenty-one, abandoned by his father, who worked for an Indo welfare association for twenty cents per day. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 966

Categorization

• XREF: The comparative move of relativizing poverty against a worse reference group echoes how administers deploy ‘at least you’re not X’ logic; similar argument to Bosma’s work on Indos.