The commission’s leniency suggests native kampongs housed far more Europeans than records admit

Evidence

With whom was the commission worried about being “too harsh”? Some paupers were seen as a class apart. Others deserving of more compassion were those brought to conditions of disgrace through no fault of their own. Even those who sought to live “unknown or hidden as much as possible” so as not to expose smuggling and other illegal pursuits garnered some sympathy. The commissioners’ refusal to treat punitively those forced to retreat to the kampongs suggests that this may have been the only option for many more Europeans, not just those who were “poor Indos.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 871

Categorization

• XREF: This inference-about-suppressed-reality method resonates with Ann Stoler’s own methodology of reading colonial archives ‘along the archival grain’ against the grain — reading silences and marginalia as evidence.