Dutch colonial authorities feared misplaced affective attachments as political dangers.

Evidence

Dutch colonial authorities were troubled by the distribution of sentiment, by both its excessive expression and the absence of it; of European fathers too attached to their mixed blood offspring; of Indies-born European children devoid of attachment to their (Dutch) cultural origins; of European-educated children who, upon return to the Indies, held sympathies and sensibilities out of order and out of place. Administrative debates over social policy were strained over the extent to which the affective attachments colonial agents and subjects held for family, language, and homeland were at odds and whether they should-and could ever-be under the 3 Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 351

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Affective governance connects to the reader’s interest in colonial commonsense and to Foucault’s biopower themes.

Related

• Dutch colonial officials worried that emotional attachments threatened racial and cultural boundaries. (similarity 0.92)
• Dutch colonial governance centered on managing subjects’ affective states (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial state management of sentiment was itself an instrument of power. (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial states continuously staked political security on governing subjects’ feelings (similarity 0.83)
• Dutch colonial rule was preoccupied with sentiment and affect, not reason alone. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial authorities feared steady sensibilities more than emotional outbursts (similarity 0.81)
• Dutch colonial administration long tried to engineer loyal domestic and schooling environments (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial child-rearing debates continued long-running European theories of how affect forms (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial officials took the political force of affect more seriously than later historians did (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial officials feared native domestic influence over European children more than skills gaps (similarity 0.81)
• Dutch colonial historiography has underrated the political force of family affect (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial child-rearing policy aimed to standardize European children’s emotions of belonging (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial commissions invested in cataloguing affective dispositions like resentment and rancor (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial governance ran as much on sentiment’s management as on reason’s rule. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial fears centered durable resentments rather than momentary passions (similarity 0.80)