Colonial scholarship cited old commission findings to show continuity, not change

Evidence

As the expanse of the archive changed, the commissions of 1872 and 1901 remained authoritative reference points. Newspaper articles, scholarly papers, doctoral theses turned back to their “findings” to identify “the problem” again and again—not to document transformation, but rather to show how little had changed. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1010

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes how epistemic authority in other colonial archives (e.g., Indian census reports) is repeatedly invoked less for information than for stabilization of categories.