Colonial statistics failed to capture the perceived status of poor Europeans

Evidence

In Batavia the surveys were recognized as a failure and the statistics as unreliable. There the committee complained that if they had had to use a general yardstick of “poverty, “then there were hardly any paupers to be counted.” But “the simple character of poor relief” meant nothing in a colonial situation. … The definition of pauper—a term which has become an accepted term in everyday speech here—we use in its wider meaning, i.e., in the sense of people, albeit not in great hardship, who by circumstances, dependent or not of their own free will, have fallen into a situation which is unsatisfactory for the future, and for the family, considering the place that one would want the European elements to have within the native society. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 929