Poor Euroasians drop out of colonial and postcolonial historiography through archival naming shifts

Evidence

For colonial observers they were a plight and too present; for postcolonial historians they remained peripheral to the colonial stories they have chosen to tell. In the archives they are in both obvious and unexpected places: in the fixed frames of colonial history, they emerge and submerge, get “lost” in changing nomenclatures and sometimes cannot be “seen” at all. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 858

Categorization

• SEED: The pattern of populations that ‘emerge and submerge’ through changing nomenclatures in colonial archives is a strong methodological angle for an essay on archival invisibility and the construction of historical subjects.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated interest in epistemic anxieties and colonial commonsense — the theme of archive-as-filter directly parallels work on subaltern studies and the archive question.
• QUESTION: Which specific naming changes caused poor Europeans to become unseeable in the records? The passage gestures at mechanism but doesn’t spell it out.