Colonial poor-relief commissions substituted race for class in their moral calculus

Evidence

Such commissions were neither unique to the nineteenth century nor to the colonies. But those devoted to poor relief, poverty, and pauperism were specific to a particular European moment of intensified social reform and of righteous state confirmations of commitment to it. In the Netherlands the first such commission of 1815 launched a flood of commissions that followed. In Britain the Poor Law Commission of 1834 provided the template for 74 more such inquiries in the 1850s alone. If Jeremy Bentham’s dictum, “banish poverty, you banish wealth,” captured the moral calculus of this commission-making impulse—devoted to sharply distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor—in the colonial heartlands of empire, such as Java, the emphasis was elsewhere. Bentham’s warning, as the two preceding chapters should make clear, might easily have read: “Banish race, you banish wealth.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 814

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s theme of colonial commonsense — the racial re-coding of what were metropolitan class categories; parallels scholarship on the deserving/undeserving poor in empire. — connects to: Welfarist colonial policy substituted social justice rhetoric for political independence — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 242; Nineteenth-century public generosity went only to blameless suffering groups — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 1202