Europeans themselves lived as paupers across Java’s main cities by the 1870s

Evidence

The “rural romance” that gained momentum in the 1870s was directly responsive to the failures of the artisan-based reform effort. But it was also responsive to what the Indies administration saw as a “terrifying increase” of European pauperism, with Europeans and their descendants “living in wretched conditions” in virtually all of Java’s main cities—Batavia, Soerabaja, and Semarang, the latter “probably the worst of all.” The fact that the rural vision outlined a much more limited set of financial responsibilities for the state conferred on it broad government appeal. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 757

Categorization

• QUESTION: The scale of white/European pauperism in the colonial Indies, explicitly acknowledged as ‘terrifying increase,’ would be worth quantifying from commission records.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how colonial commonsense policed race boundaries — poor whites destabilize the racial hierarchy’s core assumptions.