Colonial orphanages in Dutch Indies cities housed destitute European-descended children

Evidence

Verbalen from the 1870s had printed on the title page “subject.” Thus the 4 December 1872 verbaal is titled “subsidies to charitable institutions in the Indies.” But this only partially reflects what the verbaal was about, not charities in any general sense, but exclusively those orphanages in the urban centers of Semarang, Batavia, and Surabaya where most of the European population lived and where most of their destitute descendants and abandoned mixed blood offspring ended up. An appended letter of the Resident of Batavia writes of the increasing number of impoverished Europeans with no means of support; another from the Director of Education provides detailed lists of the cost and materials—number of towels and pillows, cotton undershirts and pants—allocated for each interned child. This is not among the most interesting of verbalen for the subjects I treat here, but it does indicate the range of particulars of the everyday that could make their way into documents passed between the highest echelons of the colonial administration. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 92

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘abandoned mixed blood offspring’ echoes the reader’s interest in colonial commonsense about race; anticipates the book’s later treatment of mixed-blood children.