Dutch colonial rule was preoccupied with sentiment and affect, not reason alone.

Evidence

I question continued confidence in that model and what precepts have supported such a claim. For if an homage to reason was a hallmark of the colonial, it was neither pervasive nor persuasive, nor was it empire’s sole guiding force. As striking in the nineteenth-century Dutch colonial archive—in its more public as well as its secreted documents, official and private correspondence, commissioned reports, guides to good health and household management, as well as programs of economic reform, primary education, and belles-lettres—is not the rule of reason but what might be (mis)construed as its very opposite: namely, a discursive density around issues of sentiment and their subversive tendencies, around “private” feelings and their political consequences, around the racial attribution of sensibilities, and around assessments of affective dispositions and their beneficent and dangerous political effects. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 350

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in colonial epistemic anxieties — this reverses the standard reason-vs-irrationality frame and centers affect as a governance technology.
• STORYSTEM: An archive obsessed with the subversive tendencies of ‘private’ feeling — colonial bureaucratic surveillance of emotion — could seed fiction about officials policing whom colonists love and how they grieve.
• QUESTION: Does the author’s evidence support calling sentiment a governing concern rivaling reason, or merely a supplementary anxiety? The ‘not the rule of reason but its very opposite’ bracketing invites scrutiny.