Metropolitan orphan children were staged through colonies en route to settling Algeria
Evidence
In its French variant one minutely conceived plan, outlined in 1854, en- visioned “preparatory colonies” of young orphan children who would then be transferred to “colonies of transition” for those aged 12–14, where an adolescent would be “bronzed by the sun in Provence, Roussil- lon or Langeudoc” and finally transported to the “colonies of applica- tion” in Algeria where those aged 14–21 would learn proper cultivation of the soil and of the self. Out of this progression of children’s agricul- tural colonies would be the future colonists of North Africa’s French homesteads. Some of these plans were indeed carried out, though never with the order and detail of their paper visions. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 766
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- QUESTION: An explicit life-course engineered from orphanhood to settler: worth investigating whether similar staged pathways existed in Dutch Indies contexts.