Colonial state management of sentiment was itself an instrument of power.

Evidence

It is not just that private passions had public consequences, a point that has been made often and well. Nor is it that the metaphors of feeling culled from other intimate, trusted, and well-established communities of sentiment shored up the ties between ruler and ruled, as Lynn Hunt cogently argues in her analysis of the “family romance” of the French Revolution. Nor is it, as historian Melvin Yazawa contended with regard to the early American Republic, that “the conception of a polity that combined restraint with affection … [drew on] the traditional familial paradigm of patriarchal authority.” These analyses focus on the practical power of paternalistic metaphor and familial analogy, but less on the sorts of governing practices that directed and reworked the affective bonds within families themselves. … My argument is rather that the Dutch colonial state’s concern over sentiment, the state’s assessments of the intensity of “feelings,” “attachments,” and senses of belonging—prompting loyalties to race over family, or family over state—were not metaphors for something else. These administrative apprehensions were instrumental as “dense transfer points” of power in themselves. Such concerns informed virtually every aspect of racial policy, political calibrations, and the tone and tenor of the archives produced about them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 387

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s archival work on colonial governance, and to Foucault’s ‘dense transfer points’ concept; parallels Lynn Hunt’s family romance argument.
• DEEPTHINKING: The core thesis of the book — reframes affect management not as rhetoric masking power but as power itself — is a dense, paradigm-shifting claim.