Colonial rural-resettlement schemes copied European models rather than local expertise

Evidence

Projects were proposed to remove the Inlandsche kinderen from urban slums and relocate them in contained rural settlements where they would learn self-sufficiency and remain out of sight, if not out of place. But the model on which authorities drew took advantage neither of local conditions nor expertise. Their sights were not really on the countryside and rural settlements but what came to be one of the most famous pan-European experiments in disciplined social reform. This was the agricultural colony at Mettray, on which other reformatory-prison colonies were fashioned in the Netherlands, England, Belgium, and France. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 759

Categorization

• SEED: The paradoxical move of solving a colonial-specific ‘race problem’ by importing a pan-European carceral template, ignoring local conditions, could ground an essay on how colonial commonsense imports metropole expertise to manage the ‘half-caste’ at the empire’s racial margins.