Colonial regimes feared family affection could override imperial loyalty

Evidence

Architects of colonial rule saw familial attachments implicated in political security in nuanced ways. They not only sought to intervene in the secreted domestic arrangements of European homes, but worried over whether weak—or excessively strong—personal attachments would trump political loyalties. George Orwell’s futuristic fantasy in 1984 of a thoughtpolice that staked out interior family spaces was undoubtedly based on the specter of totalitarian European states, but it was equally motivated by another manifestation of those states that Orwell and generations of his family knew more intimately and at least as well, the British Empire. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 599

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the ‘immodesty’ moral-panics catalog, where policing the intimate and domestic was a recurring governance instrument.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing the archival evidence that British imperial domestic-policing, not just Soviet-type totalitarianism, shaped Orwell’s imaginary.