Colonial rulers obsessed over a handful of poor Europeans while ignoring vast native dispossession

Evidence

Why was so much time and labor devoted to a population that would not have filled a small hamlet in a colony that counted the native dispossessed in the hundreds of thousands? Commissioner King was one of many confused by the numbers when he noted the 6,500 Indies-born Europeans counted by the 1870 government gazetteer. If approximately 1,600 were in civil service, 2,150 in industry, and nearly 400 more in trade or the plantation industry, he asked, were the remaining thousands all vagrants (“rondloopende personen”)? What kind of contact had they with needy? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 831

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The stark asymmetry between a 39-person pauper population consuming a massive commission while hundreds of thousands of native dispossessed went uninvestigated crystallizes how colonial classification anxieties revolved around European identity, not material deprivation itself.
• XREF: Connects to broader colonial common-sense scholarship treating the ‘poor white’ question in other empires (e.g., British India’s ‘poor whites’ and South Africa’s ‘poor whites’ problem) as racial regimes of belonging rather than welfare concerns.