Colonial statistics measured moral deviance through deviation from the norm

Evidence

As instruments of moral science, statistics used deviations from the mean to identify deviations from the norm. Commissions joined those numbers with prototypic cases to measure gradations of morality and the gradations of unfreedom that went along with them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 184

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how statistical ‘moral science’ worked: deviation-from-mean as a proxy for deviation-from-norm, then paired with case studies.