Soerabaja’s craft school subsidy collapsed from 30,000 to 300 gulden before closing

Evidence

By 1872 it was considered a “total fiasco.” The Commission on Needy Europeans mounted in that year insisted in each of its reports that the “cultivation of skilled craftsmen will no longer be our exclusive priority.” Instead, attention turned to the “upbringing of the child,” nurseries, good elementary education, and opportunities in agriculture. The Soerabaja craft school’s state subsidy had dropped from 30,000 gulden in 1861 to 5,000, then l,000, and finally to 300 gulden by 1872, when it closed. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 744

Categorization

• XREF: A precise quantitative marker of colonial policy failure — useful to cite alongside other subsidy-collapse evidence in the reader’s archival work.