Wide native foreknowledge of attacks exceeded the circle of actual participants

Evidence

Here again, Valck insists that the attacks were strategically directed and planned. He makes no comment, however, on a more unsettling implication: that many more people from Sumatra’s subject populations knew in advance about the assaults than those who actively participated in them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1192

Categorization

• QUESTION: What does the wide ‘knowing but not participating’ circle imply about solidarity, silence, and the limits of colonial surveillance? Worth chasing in more sources.
• DEEPTHINKING: The scholar’s remark lands heavily: colonial authorities could not even register the scale of communal awareness enveloping them. The epistemic blindness here is itself a mechanism.