European vagrants in colonial Java lived itinerantly in native settlements, alarming the 1872 commission

Evidence

Nowhere was this juxtaposition of the commonplace and the unusual more striking than over the question of European beggars. Although commission members claimed that the number of vagrant Europeans was insignificant, debates about legally regulating their movements suggested otherwise. The precise transgressions that were at issue were identified with circumspection, often in the guise of extended debates about what counted as trespassing, who had residency permits, and what it meant to have a “permanent residence.” Thus the commission questioned what to do with European vagrants who might stay “this week in this native kampong, the next in another” or with those “who passed the night on the front verandah of a native house?” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 867

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Stoler’s broader colonial commonsense/epistemic anxiety work and to literature on ‘white’ poverty destabilizing colonial racial categories, e.g. the ‘poor whites’ in other colonial contexts like the American South or South Africa.
• QUESTION: What precisely made a European beggar staying in native kampongs so transgressive that it warranted regulation despite numbers being ‘insignificant’? The scale of the anxiety seems out of proportion.