The 1901 commission report reframed itself through historical retrospectives of colonial welfare efforts.

Evidence

Indeed, some volumes in the 1901 commission report were devoted entirely to assessments of earlier initiatives. The initial volume thus signaled its new critical approach with an 1850 report of Batavia’s Resident on “the considerable increase in recent years of impoverished Inlandsche kinderen”—to which he did not see authorities giving adequate attention. Other volumes provided historical introductions, as did the one on education that described every private and state school opened (and closed) over the preceding hundred years. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 888