The commission redefined pauperism around racial status to defuse resistance to counting.

Evidence

Repeatedly, the commission reissued statements to affirm that it was not after “the details of people’s lives,” but rather wanted a “global approxi- mation” of the conditions of the less-advantaged: “Those Europeans who, though not in a strict sense belonging to “personae miserabiles,” of Euro- pean society, [those] seen as needy in relationship to the circumstances and the proper quality of life demanded of the European race and who have not yet sunk to the level of the lesser Natives.” These were not to be con- sidered “pauper statistics in the strict sense of the word,” as so many thought, but merely the “broad limits” within which pauperism might be considered and framed. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 923

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The racial ordering ‘European vs lesser Natives’ parallels colonial commonsense hierarchies propelling the reader’s archival focus.

Related

• The 1901 Pauperism Commission actively produced race categories through classification (similarity 0.89)
• The commission defined European pauperism by race-based expectations of living standards (similarity 0.85)
• Pauperism commissions were diverted by racial classification anxieties (similarity 0.83)
• The pauper category policed racial standing rather than measuring material want (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial commissions actively produced racial social categories rather than describing them. (similarity 0.80)
• Batavia’s committee admitted the pauper statistics measured colonial status, not poverty (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial census categories could define away inconvenient poverty by racial reclassification (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial officials defined European need relative to native status rather than absolute poverty (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• The 1901 Pauperism Commission actively produced race categories through classification #corroborates (0.90) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 183
• Pauperism commissions in the colonies redirected their moral calculus from poverty to race. #expands (0.70)
• The 1901 commission discovered that assumed racial knowledge was actually wrong #contradicts (0.60)
• Racial categories were administratively imposed on people formerly counted as white in the 1760s #complicates (0.50)