Each economic crisis replayed identical anxieties about waning European standards among lower Indos

Evidence

The same problem elicited the same question raised by the pauperism commissions of thirty and sixty years earlier: would the emergency wage reductions still allow the lower Indo rungs of the colonial bureaucracy to live at a level “that could still be called ‘European’”? The doctor W. M. F. Mansvelt, who posed the question in his essay in the esteemed scholarly journal Koloniale Studiën, was sure they would not. He recited the failed efforts of the 1872 commission to have its proposals implemented and the “improved economic conditions” that made the recommendations of the 1901 commission superfluous. But his fear was the same: that a reduced standard of living would lead to stronger native connections, to a revival of Indo-European political parties of the turn of the century, and to a stronger collusion with the growing nationalist movement. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1006

Categorization

• QUESTION: What exactly did the ‘European’ standard of living denote materially as opposed to symbolically, and why was maintaining a measurable level so central to colonial identity?