Commissioners outnumbered the destitute Europeans they investigated in 1872 Batavia.

Evidence

None of this would have been so surprising if the 1872 commission had not concluded—after seven months of meetings, opinion papers, and secret reports—that there were no more than 39 Europeans in Batavia with no means of livelihood, just one-third of the number of commissioners called on to do the investigation: 26 were in the military, 2 of whom were ranked military officials; 6 were sailors; 1 was a carpenter; 1 was a steersman; 2 were typesetters; and several were unspecified. Divided according to background, 16 were “of lowly origin,” 9 with a “good education,” and 14 substantially of “the middle class.” In all, 17 men were heavy drinkers, of which 7 were in trouble with the police: the remaining 22 gave “no immediate cause for complaint.” The figures were arbitrary, as were the categories for analysis, suggesting to some that pauperism was underestimated, to others that it was inflated, and to still others that there was something seriously flawed in the investigation. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 830

Categorization

• CANDY: A commission of 39 members investigated 39 pauperized Europeans — a darkly funny bureaucratic absurdity.
• SEED: Essay angle on the manufactured scale of colonial social problems — investigation effort inversely proportional to the problem’s magnitude.