Relief surveys risked politically radicalizing poor Europeans

Evidence

These were charged issues and Otto Knaap eagerly played out their political implications. Knowing the class fears of his adversaries, he warned that their inquiry could easily backfire on their do-good intentions in explosive and unintended ways. Those already politicized and inclined to a communist bent, “de proletariërs,” would become further embittered— precisely that group the 1872 commission had been concerned to quell, and those whom Batavian authorities in May 1848 feared might have been behind the demonstration of “city fathers and coloreds” led by Van Hoëvell. Again, Knaap had identified what was to be a strong undercurrent in the commission’s subjacent enterprise. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 933