Colonial regimes treated parental anguish as a contagious political force worth containing

Evidence

Colonial authorities afforded very little political weight to such singular stories as that of “Meurouw van der Poot,” but the cumulative strain that such distress produced was in part what the administrative alarm was about). On the line was the Dutch regime’s ability to assess the import of such sentiments—to predict and contain its visceral and, what Hume and Van Hoëvell understood so well, “contagious” quality. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 531

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘contagious emotion’ frame resonates with other colonial-surveillance literatures discussed around epistemic anxiety and community feeling.
• QUESTION: What exactly did Van Hoëvell and Hume say about emotional contagion, and how did colonial administrators try to predict and contain it?