Mettray’s discipline was adapted to breed a colonial middle class for empire

Evidence

What set Mettray apart from these efforts was the rigorous and meticulous structuring of psychological, bodily, and spatial disciplines. It focused on mock-family arrangements, close comaradery, and the details of the everyday. Here young vagrants and urban delinquents were to be taught respect for religion, family, and labor. In the Indies, Mettray principles were easily adapted, but cast in a local, colonial frame: To develop religious sensibilities in the hearts of the youth through unceasing surveillance of their behavior, allowing them to resist their tendencies to indolence and to develop their skills and character. [Only then would they form an] esteemed and cultivated middenstand who would make up a solid element and support European colonisation. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 772

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘middenstand’ (middle class) creation goal in the colony — fascinating echo of the Reader’s epistemic anxieties, since it produces a class whose identity is shaped by colonial discipline.