The same social term shifted meaning radically between metropole and colony

Evidence

The term “pauperism” had wide currency in Europe: first in England, in France after 1815, and in the Netherlands a few decades later. Historians concerned with the pauper class in Holland hold that there the term connoted a “covert danger” and a social plague, an ambivalent sense of compassion and disgust for those impoverished. Used in the Netherlands to emphasize “the social responsibilities and financial burdens associated with the presence of enormous numbers of poor people in their midst,” in the Indies it signaled the reverse. If the lexicon was shared, as we have seen, the solutions were not. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 980

Categorization

• XREF: Parallel to the broader theme of colonial epistemic circulation: a shared vocabulary deployed oppositely in colony vs metropole echoes analysis of ‘moral panics’ crossing contexts in colonial study.