Contradictory colonial policies reveal competing racial epistemologies among administrators.

Evidence

If the pauperism commissions provide sites where shared understandings were justified and rehearsed, the discrepant assessments of what counted as European impoverishment in a specifically colonial context pulled at the seams of common sense in unintended ways. It did more than reveal the flimsy fabric of racial categories. It exposed a centralized colonial state whose departments and divisions were not in touch. It called to discussion the intricate stitching and sloppy patchwork of educational policy, residence laws, pension stipulations, and labor ordinances that contradicted one another as they differently defined what rules would hold for a colonial underclass neither fully of the rulers nor wholly of the ruled. If destitution of Europeans and their mixed descendants was the problem, what mattered to the “solutions” was how those who decided policy (and those who carried it out) imagined they could and should know race. Racial epistemologies were at issue. Epistemic politics and its practical consequences pushed the accumulation of paper. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 825

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to colonial commonsense literature on categorization and rule-of-law contradictions — parallels to domestic colonial archives like Irish or settler administration.
• DEEPTHINKING: The point that contradictory policies are not failures but constitutive sites where racial epistemics get argued out — pushing paper as a direct political effect — resists reduction to one sentence.