Dutch colonial officials redefined mixed-race paupers by register absence and locality

Evidence

By some accounts, the Inlandsche kinderen were pauperized whites, subaltern soldiers, widows with meager pensions, fair-skinned children conceived in the army barracks whose comportment, speech, and habits were locally learned and singularly Javanese. These included the impoverished: children of mixed parentage who were educated in state-run schools; children “given up” by their well-born Dutch fathers; the offspring of soldiers (soldatenkinderen) of commoner European origin. Some were included because of their absence from the municipal civil registers, others because of where or how they lived. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 664

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the category Inlandsche kinderen through its heterogeneous membership criteria.
• XREF: Parallels colonial miscegenation categories in Farah Nuruddin’s Maps and general colonial identity-taxonomy literature.
• QUESTION: What role did the ‘absence from municipal civil registers’ play in rendering these people administratively legible or invisible?