Colonial visibility required assigning serial numbers to people and things.

Evidence

No one has found a better metaphor for this frame of mind than the great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who entitled the final volume of his tetralogy on the colonial period Rumah Kaca – the Glass House. It is an image, as powerful as Bentham’s Panopticon, of total surveyability. For the colonial state did not merely aspire to create, under its control, a human landscape of perfect visibility; the condition of this ‘visibility’ was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial number. This style of imagining did not come out of thin air. It was the product of the technologies of navigation, astronomy, horology, surveying, photography and print, to say nothing of the deep driving power of capitalism. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 679

Categorization

• XREF: The Glass House parallels Bentham’s Panopticon from Foucault, and the serial-number condition of visibility connects to biopolitical enumeration — scaffolding for necropolitics readings. — connects to: Colonial survey data collection was uneven and often fabricated by officials; Colonial administrative documents exceeded the demands for proof and causation; Spanish colonial slave duties measured human beings in arbitrary standardized pieces (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘total surveyability’ and the serial-number condition of colonial visibility as key concepts.

Related

• Total visibility of subjects requires assigning each a serial number (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial management required objectifying territories through maps and data-gathering surveys. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Spanish colonial slave duties measured human beings in arbitrary standardized pieces #exemplifies (0.85)
• Colonial filing systems themselves produced methods of domination. #expands (0.80)
• Colonial survey data collection was uneven and often fabricated by officials #qualifies (0.75)
• Colonial administrative decision-making consolidated conflicting local knowledge into packages #expands (0.75)
• Colonial administrative documents exceeded the demands for proof and causation #expands (0.72)