Imperial comfort and domestic coziness depended on studied inattention to local people.

Evidence

But wedged between those comforts was something else: the unruly nature of people’s social imaginaries, discrepancies between the concerted and yearned for domestic “coziness” that empire induced and what emerges as its underside—estrangements from family, studied inattentiveness to the conditions around them, and to the local people whom they could not see—and to whom they were beholden for their comforts and often for their survival. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1332