Failed and minor colonial events deserve historical study as much as major ones

Evidence

Many of the “events” on which I focus here are really not “events” at all. Sometimes, as in chapter 4, I refer to them as “non-events” since they are records of things that never happened. Similarly, often those events to which I attend are not those that figure as central in the colonial and postcolonial historiography of the Netherlands Indies. In fact, many of them would be considered to have little consequence. The European Pauperism Commissions discussed in chapters 4 and 5 have rarely been accorded an historiographic entry; the May 1848 demonstration of creole Europeans and “Indos,” the subject of chapter 3, receives only occasional and passing reference by students of Dutch colonial history. Similarly, in studies of the Dutch colonial policy, the artisanal schools and agricultural colonies for mixed blood children, described in chapter 4, leave barely a historiographic trace. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 50

Categorization

• SEED: An essay could argue for a ‘non-event historiography’ — studying records of things that never happened as primary evidence of colonial anxiety.