The Minister suppressed welfare findings citing missing statistics.
Evidence
Their rationale was clear: given the āprevailing spirit of dis- content,ā people needed assurance that they were not being āoverlooked.ā The Minister of Colonies, I. D. Fransen van den Putte, conservative and highly protective of state interests and funds, thought otherwise. On reading the report, he not only forbade its publication. He criticized nearly every recommendation made, accusing the commission of placing all blame on the government. His advisory board, the Raad van IndiĆ«, did not uphold his position, instead concluding that āa huge number of descendants of Eu- ropeans [were] drudging through miserable lives with no means of exis- tence.ā He ignored their conclusion and questioned the claim. With a lack of statistics, he quipped, what did the commission really know about the livelihoods of the nearly 8,000 Indies-born Europeans that only Commis- sioner King had bothered to mention? (The fact that Van den Putteās ļ¬gure was a good 1,500 people more than Commissioner Kingās was an artifact of the problem with the category itself and who was included in it.) ā Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemicā¦, 849
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Statistics as a weapon of epistemic deferral ā a hallmark of colonial common sense the reader tracks. The category-artifact aside is a gem.
Related
- Colonial officials suppressed reports by disputing statistics they themselves could not verify (similarity 0.88)
- Commission reports blamed mixed-race poverty on native mothersā moral failings and parental neglect (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Material critiques of mixed-race poverty were suppressed in official reports.
#exemplifies(0.70) ā Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemicā¦, 845