Dutch authorities blamed Indos’ failure on false pride, but Indos feared caste confusion

Evidence

Viewed from the workshop floor, they saw the real problem with the quality of workers from Holland, who were far inferior candidates than were the Indies youth. They described a Dutch lower-class population that was generally older, dissipated by liquor, with neither “vitality” (levenskracht) nor a moral compass. The idea of creating an independent burgerklasse out of these men, they opined, was pure fantasy. Their argument anticipated a theme that Van Deventer was to bring up a decade later—that the creation of a “subordinate but technologically skilled personnel” would need to target a broader population, “the entire expanding class of European descent.” He too saw a population no longer content to remain office scribes and factory hands but one that sought “work that they could judiciously and independently carry out.” Self-worth in labor, dignity in employment, and political independence were seen to go dangerously hand in hand. … Everyone “knew” that mixed blood youth were too proud to do the same work as natives. What few could recognize was that they did not aspire to be placed alongside working-class Europeans: “The inlandse kind [sic], above all else, is fearful and apprehensive of being confused with natives and would not choose to be part of a European ambachtstand… . [They] are ashamed of their work clothes, and of the company they keep in their workplaces.” It was the “company” of lowly Dutchmen for which they had disdain. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 743

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader colonial archives work on how rulers explain away institutional failure by pathologizing the colonized subject — same reflex as in other colonial bureaucracies.