Colonial states engineered morality by harnessing affect in their agents.

Evidence

In the colonies, Weber’s reasoned state, staffed by “cultivated men,” complemented Durkheim’s moralizing one. Colonial states were in the business of “engineering morality,” both among their agents and those ruled. As such, both Weber and Durkheim attended to a register of governance neither explicitly named: the harnessing of affect in the state’s shaping of what constituted morality and who had the right to assess it. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 426

Categorization

• QUESTION: Which colonial archival sources directly evidence this ‘engineering of morality’ as a deliberate state project versus a retrospective scholarly frame?
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 426
• XREF: connects to: Colonial reformers’ ethical indignation coexisted with colonial privilege; Colonial moral epithets encoded specific class and racial transgressions; Colonial dispositions are trained, contested, and deliberately interpreted (+19 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial training schemes aimed to shape sentiments and restrict desires #corroborates (0.85)
• Colonial sentiment discipline targeted colonizers themselves, not only the colonized #expands (0.85)
• Critique from within colonial power is constrained by personal dependence on that system #expands (0.75)
• Colonial dispositions are trained, contested, and deliberately interpreted #qualifies (0.72)
• Colonial reformers’ ethical indignation coexisted with colonial privilege #complicates (0.70)
• Colonial emotional attributions constructed the social hierarchies they claimed to describe #expands (0.70)
• Colonial race epistemology merged physical traits with moral character assessments #expands (0.62)
• Colonial moral epithets encoded specific class and racial transgressions #expands (0.60)
• Colonial officials used language hierarchy to justify claims of Indigenous mental inferiority #expands (0.60)
• Pauperism commissions in the colonies redirected their moral calculus from poverty to race. #expands (0.60)
• Colonial administrative decision-making consolidated conflicting local knowledge into packages #expands (0.58)
• Scholars model state-affect relations several conflicting ways, none dominant #responds-to (0.55)
• Capitalist accumulation was built on colonial conquest and enslavement. #responds-to (0.50) — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 82