Dutch colonial officials worried that emotional attachments threatened racial and cultural boundaries.

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

• ADDENDUM: Deepens the reader’s ‘moral panics over immodesty’ interest by showing colonial states panicking over the distribution of feeling — mixed-race fathers too attached, returnees with misplaced sympathies — as a parallel technology of policing identity.
• XREF: The concern over ‘sympathies and sensibilities out of order and out of place’ echoes the reader’s existing interest in colonial epistemic anxieties and situated knowledge.