Colonial welfare systems formally excluded partially European families and native companions from coverage.

Evidence

Some commissioners made the point that subaltern soldiers commanded wages too low to afford the urban housing districts where most Europeans with more substantial incomes chose to live. Others noted that native women living with European men outside of wedlock were not entitled to widows’ pensions. Even those widowed European women with pensions could not subsist on the state’s inadequate subsidies and automatically lost them upon remarriage. Children not legally recognized by their European fathers had no access to European schools. Moreover, free healthcare that was, in principle, available to all lower civil servants “and their families” was considered a “gross fiction,” when those families included “native companions” (huishoudster, literally housekeeper), the mothers of their illegitimate children, who were categorically excluded from state subsidies. As the commission remarked, health care for the native population was more “generous” than that designated for those who were partially European. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 839

Categorization

• SHARE: The irony that healthcare was more generous for natives than for partially European families is a sharp archival finding worth flagging.
• XREF: The ‘gross fiction’ of inclusive policy language connects to the broader epistemic theme of rhetoric versus actual colonial administrative practice. — connects to: Progressive-era immigration law expressly excluded the diseased, criminal, illiterate, and Asiatic. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3884