Colonial rulers attributed unrest to both local white sentiment and imported European revolution

Evidence

Authorities in Batavia spent the next weeks and months after the May demonstration struggling to clarify the causes and meaning of the event. They questioned whether it was a home-grown colonial liberalism that had seized white Java, parental sentiments that were turning the state’s very agents against it, the clamor for constitutional reform in the Netherlands echoing in the archipelago, or revolutionary fervor transported by print, passengers, and rumor via Trieste and Marseille. Rochussen’s report was confused about what was a risk, and what and who was to blame. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 543