Colonial writers pathologized mixed populations as a corrosive secret threat to society.

Evidence

The debate was fierce and if the word “race” was not always invoked, its predicates were. As one author in a popular Batavian weekly wrote in 1916: “the descendants of Europeans who lived in purely native, and largely immoral surroundings” might not exhibit “savage anarchism or debauched bestiality as in Europe,” but it was still the case that they formed “in secret, hardly visibly … a corrosive cancer gnawing at the sexual strength of our society.” Fabricated Europeans, too, remained a prevailing threat. No one could miss the dismissive irony of the same author or the targets of his scorn when he opined that some Dutch in the Indies had become so “enamored with the Javanese” that they would gladly make even them European. For the Hans van de Walls of the colonial world in 1916, the empire could and should never allow native colonial subjects to be confused—legally or otherwise—with their masters. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1005

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the moral-panics article: colonial anxiety over racial mixing as a classed, embodied panic with disease and sexual-strength metaphors.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: why colonial discourse framed miscegenation as a hidden internal cancer rather than an overt threat — the epidemiology of race anxiety.