In the Netherlands Indies, these colonial archives were an arsenal of sorts that could be reactivated to suit new governing strategies.

Documents honed in the pursuit of prior issues could be requi- sitioned to write new histories, might be reclassified for new initiatives, could be renewed to fortify security measures against what were per- ceived as new assaults on imperial sovereignty and its moralizing claims.

Those epistemic practices were not just recorded in the colonial archive, but developed and worked through the genres of docu- mentation that civil servants were required to make.

The fact that they led no revolts and produced no martyrs to their cause had little bearing on the high- pitched fears that eddied around them.

By administrative design, these gathered documents constituted the evidentiary packages for decisions to be made. Such accumulations of conflicting assessments, extraneous detail, anecdote, and local know-how are flash points of something else: of epistemic habits called into ques- tion, of certain knowledge in the face of uncertain conditions, of bold and equivocal interpretations of the everyday.

[It] will never receive the honor of being kept in the State archives.” Burned as soon as it is read, it is reduced to “dust and smoke”—an archive that is to remain in darkness.

In Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s vision, disappeared documents and distorted reports are the archive’s paltry truths.

These colonial archives were both transparencies on which power relations were in- scribed and intricate technologies of rule in themselves.

Because imagining what might be was as important as knowing what was, these archives of the visionary and expectant should rivet our atten- tion upon their erratic movement back and forth in verbal tense: the con- ditional could powerfully reshape an immediate response as it recursively rewrote the present and refigured events that had long passed.

If historians “tell of things that have been,” and poets “of things as might be,” as Paul Ricoeur’s parsing of the Aris- totelian distinction insists, this ethnographic history of these colonial imaginaries seeps across the futuristic and the actual to capture some- thing of both.

But in these archives the panoptic is a frail conceit. Administrative overviews index conventional forms of assumed mastery less than comprehensive knowledge.

If one could argue that the presence of European beggars and homeless Dutchmen in the streets of Batavia in the 1870s were “secrets” to those in the Netherlands, they certainly were not to European post office clerks, Javanese construction workers, or Chinese storekeepers who lived on the sprawling low-lying peripheries inhabited by the impoverished of Java’s urban centers.

Documents were sometimes marked geheim because of the magnitude of a problem, at other times because officials could not agree on a shared sense of what the problems were. Rather than secreted truths about the state, they point to sites of unease, anticipatory warnings of emergent movement among subject populations (what Raymond Williams might even include as “structures of feeling”) of resentments that may not yet have had a name.

Striking in this accumulation process is how much of what was col- lected was made irrelevant to what state officials decided, both to what they acknowledged they could do in practice and what about the Indies they claimed to know.

Debates on the Inlandsche kinderen were driven by implicit notions of racial decorum, and anxious concern over the nonvisual criteria of racial membership. If easily distinguished from both well-heeled Europeans and the native and Chinese population, who they, in fact, were enjoyed less consensus.

But what constitutes common sense is at once historical and political; colonial contexts teach us clearly that dispositions are trained and disci- plined and not without deliberation. Like habitus, they are neither uniform nor uncontested. Dispositions emerge out of a habitus that is rejected, ac- cepted, or uneasily accommodated. Dispositions are not given, they are interpretations, discerned and made.

In treating archival documents not as the historical ballast to ethnography, but as a charged site of it, I see the call for an emergent methodological shift: to move away from treatment of the archives as an extractive exercise to an ethnographic one.

One fundamental premise of this book is a call for a less as- sured and perhaps more humble stance—that we explore the grain with care and read along it first.

Here I ask how sentiment has been dislocated in colonial studies, and why it has been relegated as the embellishment to, rather than the sub- stance of, governing projects.

Colonial states were in the business of “engineering morality,” both among their agents and those ruled. As such, both Weber and Durkheim attended to a register of governance neither explicitly named: the harnessing of affect in the state’s shaping of what constituted morality and who had the right to assess it.

Hirschman’s observation that the nineteenth-century mod- ern state would later be “called upon to perform this feat . . . as a civilizing medium” alerts us to a crucial point: that what is now taken as intuitively incompatible in the heyday of colonialism—namely, a state devoted to rea- son and defined by its efficacy in producing countervailing passions and affections—was once not thought to be so.

The ruling sent a confused message about privilege and race, for while it blatantly discriminated against the middling Indo-Europeans whose sons were confined to the lowliest civil service jobs, it was also perceived as a direct affront to the European well-to-do Dutch-born and creole Dutch who were unwilling or unable to pack their sons off to Europe for a decade of their lives.

Van Rees wasted no time. Within two days the investigation had begun but, as he pleaded to Rochussen, it was no easy task. The police had never had to deal with such an event. He insisted that in the last thirty-three years that the Indies had shown itself to be a “jewel of the Dutch crown,” there had never been a gathering of six hundred to seven hundred Europe- ans and Indische Christians in any public place intent on treating subjects of a political nature.

Instead of conducting a public in- quiry, he made the decision to carry out a “secret investigation to discover those acts carried out by high-placed officials and people, colleagues and compatriots who I have always held in esteem and for whom I always had felt kindness.” Van Rees called more than fifty men to appear in person before him between 31 May and 19 July 1848, to describe what they saw, what they did, who was present, and what they said.81 Some were inter- viewed in Dutch, some in Malay. Most strikingly, the transcripts were verbatim, conveying vibrant movement, rumors careening across the city, people accosting one another on horseback and on foot about whether they planned to go to the gathering, and what they understood it to be. Some stated outright that they were excited by the prospect, others that they were curious, and still others that they went under threat. Some di- rectly denied “with passion and impertinence” that they had actually car- ried out the actions attributed to them. Others simply crafted their ac- counts to place blame for their presence on what they were told would happen if they did not show up.

How many were actually shouting is hard to say. The voices of Ardesch, Tollens, and Thieme were heard, as was that of a retired official turned wealthy storekeeper. According to Van Rees’s most reliable informant, the government official R. van Nauta (who the assembly had appointed to Van Hoëvell’s committee to draw up a bill), the scene had degenerated into a “Polish beer garden” with everyone talking at the same time, “in groups, on chairs, behind and in front of the table” set up for the steering commit- tee. Someone pushed through the crowd to say that the coastal trade, in the hands of Arabs, had totally ruined him, a point he wanted addressed in the petition. Tollens and Thieme insisted on a free press and presented lists to sign.

Rochussen’s assessment of the situation after it took place was very dif- ferent than it had been a week earlier. He wrote Baud the next day, ex- pressing outrage that his permission for a temperate meeting of a few well- placed citizens in a private house turned into what he called “a public assembly of many hundreds of persons of different rank, unknown to one another; some with the explicit aim of discussing matters of state and the basic principles of governance.”84 That same day, he banned all public meetings “concerning matters of government and of common interest,” giving notice that armed force would be used if his order was disobeyed.

Van Rees changed the request in pencil above the original phrase. Be- tween pencil and print were hundreds and thousands of people at issue: a “meeting” versus a call for multiple demonstrations across Java, a con- tained demand versus a racially transgressive call to protest slipped be- tween those amended words. When Van Rees opined to Cantervisscher in a conciliatory gesture that the former printed words were “a slip of the pen” (schrijffout), Cantervisscher stiffened and denounced the sham. He drew from his pocket a printed convocation flyer with the uncorrected phrase. He had hundreds of copies of it on his person. In addition, he re- fused to sign the amended document.

But who and what comprised the threat was not clear, certainly not in Governor-General Rochussen’s letter to Baud four days after the gather- ing: was there subversion among the well-to-do, European-born city fa- thers, led by liberals like Van Hoëvell, or among the more extreme “hot- heads” who stayed on at de Harmonie that night after the bulk of the crowd had retired? Was it a creole uprising among the Indies-born and - bred Europeans or a seditious bid to break off from the Netherlands by destitute “coloreds” with nothing to lose?

If students of the colonial are now more ready to accept the argument that metropole and colony should be treated as one analytic field, there is far less consensus on what those contingencies look like on any specific historical ground. We remain confounded by the direct and indirect ways in which metropolitan practices shaped the face of empire and the other way around. But the conundrum is not ours alone. Working out those contingencies of confluence and commensurability, scope and scale, what bound a “community of sentiment” and what did not, were the very dilem- mas of rule and what the tools of statecraft were designed to, but could only poorly, assess.

Raising and educating Europeans in the Indies will stand in the way of a desirable civilizing of the native and this upbringing will have the result that these children so frequently suckled with the breast milk of Javanese wet nurses along with their own native children, at a more advanced age, will lack any sense of unity with Europeans. They become haughty, im- perious, lazy and lascivious.

At issue was not the insubordinate sentiments of the colonized, but rather the inappropriately expressed aspirations of those “out of charac- ter” and “out of place”: “haughty” referred to those mixed bloods who refused to do manual labor; “imperious” to those creoles who claimed their right to the status of “full-blooded” Europeans; “lascivious” to those whose sexual interests were seen as misdirected toward those above their racialized standing and class. This was an “emotional economy” of affective relations of production and exchange that tied the senses and their expression to the worth of human kinds.

Rather than extemporaneous passions was the threat of sustained sensibilities, resentments against ongoing unfreedoms, and the political standards they called into question. Outbursts were manage- able. It was those durable sentiments, those of parental distress and the wounds of estrangement, that expressed judgment and critique. These were (un)colonial dispositions and expectations with high political stakes.

What colonial officials feared was not the economic costs of providing education for Europeans in the Indies (undoubtedly cheaper for the state), but the disparate cultural, economic, and political investments of those families that sought to bring up their children in the Indies and dared to think of the Indies as their “fatherland” and make it their home. If post- colonialism has produced a “fax nationalism,” as Benedict Anderson sug- gests, colonialism produced its own distorted, long-distance variant. Colonialism in the Indies was only viable if local affinities were kept sub- ordinate, if the pleasures of the colonial remained a “hardship allowance” but the colony itself was not home.

What could be taken for a failed creole nationalist impulse—a harden- ing conflict of interest between the Indies-born Dutch and those of the Netherlands—accentuated debates over who were full-fledged citizens and who were marginal variants. It also underscored a critical feature of the colonial state’s early formation—its commitment to consolidating a more clearly delineated politics of race. Max Müller’s observation that the British colonial state in India was devoted to a “conquest of the heart” might now seem obvious, but the fact that those arts of suasion were as firmly directed at distinguishing among colonizing agents as among col- onized subjects is not.

As Ian Hacking reminds us, such systems created the very realities they ostensibly only described.

Its force also resided in its principal subject—the study of deviance, abnormal behavior, moeurs, and mental states. Referred to as “the mental science” and the “moral science,” respectively, in late-eigh- teenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain and France, its practitioners sought “ratios of deviancy” (much as they did “laws of mortality”) that would both describe and prescribe thought and action.

In one perspective, states are in the business of controlling the passions of their subjects and citizens, setting up rules to ensure they are penalized for transgressions and remain subject to a rule of reason and a rule of law. In this model, affect is out- side the state; reason is the means to sort out irrational ends. … Others, such as William Reddy, offer keen insight into how specific senti- ments drive bureaucracies, their recruitment procedures and meritocra- cies. Here affective knowledge is that on which states depend in their pursuit of “the art of knowing men.”

The sense of inlandsche here is per- haps better captured by its connotation of “home-grown”: that is, Euro- peans born and bred in the colony, the yield of its native soil.

This oscillation between presence and absence marks a social kind whose content was malleable, whose membership was reshuffled as state visions of what we might call a “domesticated race” shifted and changed.

Three stand out, not because they are wholly distinct in vision or chronology (they, in fact, work around and through one another’s visions in recursive rather than linear ways), but because they refract different referents with respect to what served for each as precedent, context, and relevant model.

But that rural romance was also part of a reformist vision that extended across the colonial globe. It is what I call here the carceral archipelago of empire. Explicitly, its blueprints were drawn from early nineteenth- century models of agricultural colonies fashioned to reform Europe’s im- poverished urban youth through bodily discipline and love of the soil. The most famous and relevant example for colonial authorities was based on the 1840 rural penal colony of Mettray and the variant experiments that it inspired.

If people want the native (den Inlander) in general to share in Western civilization, then one should guard against fostering imitation-Europeans [imitatie], hybrids with no inner strength, useless in the Netherlands as in the East-Indies itself. . . . What the Indies needs is not a generation of imitation-Europeans, but of developed natives who along with a broad knowledge of the old Indies civilization and culture have learned as much as possible from Western culture, who would appreciate its benefits without losing contact with their own people.

The appeal of the plan again spoke to more than the acquisition of specific labor skills. This was a for- mula for shaping appropriate sentiments and limited desires.

The cognitive rigor as- signed to the complexity of the Dutch language and the mental dexterity it required were opposed to the crude market Malay that was all many of- ficials knew. Thus he could confidently state that their “undeveloped skills at reasoning” were derived from “their exclusive use of the most narrow- minded and confining language of Malay.”

Van Deventer’s appraisal was more articulate than most and more de- tailed than many, but his basic premises were widely shared. The notion that children should be sent to the Netherlands, not just to learn a craft or trade, but to change the social environments in which they lived, to change “their thoughts about the world,” was based on a common con- tention: that the colony’s economic and political viability were contingent upon educating the hearts and minds of those who were a danger to it, on managing their aspirations in the Indies world.

As he so clearly put it, youths sent to the Netherlands “must not [conceive of themselves as] heeren (bosses/masters). They must not be burdened with more skills than they need . . . but only practical know- how for the tasks to which they are geared.”

The Inlandsche kinderen with whom they had worked shared little of the pe- jorative profile that so prevailed. They were neither lazy nor incompetent but “industrious and well-behaved,” eager to learn skills but lacking op- portunity and stimulation that would push them in that direction. Nor were they wanting when compared to European recruits. These managers saw the Inlandsche kinderen as preferable to them—if, that is, they re- ceived the proper training.

By 1883 state authorities had come to four conclusions: (l) the Indies badly needed technicians, whoever it ending up training for those jobs; (2) education of the Inlandsche kinderen should be limited to practical know-how, as they had no need for more and anyway the costs were too high; (3) European students should not be turned into common workers but into persons suitable as managers, supervising the work of others; and (4) the practically trained Indo and European youths should be provided with the opportunity to enter low-ranking government positions for which exams were not required.

The political dreams were different but elements remained the same: to make of them modest but respectable loyalists whose political claims would be contingent on continued denial of native rights, whose invest- ments in a racial hierarchy would remain strong, but whose sense of enti- tlement would be limited to legal European equivalency, not equal social or political status.

Accusations of “indolence” and “insolence” were substitutable codes for those unsuited and unworthy of political entitlements. Converting the former into usable labor and breaking the political will of the latter not only produced a gridlock on reform. It animated more intense adminis- trative anxiety about the coding of race.

In their densities these documents registered distributions of adminis- trative concern that gained cumulative and historical weight. Archives could arm the state with evidence and, in so doing, justify inaction, re- duce allocations, and abort policy. In this sense, they are archival events, not non-events, of capacious quality. They register the conditions of pos- sibility in which colonial authorities operated. They tell us about how im- plausibility was measured, about the constrictions in which plausible colonial truths were framed.

If Jeremy Bentham’s dictum, “banish poverty, you banish wealth,” captured the moral calculus of this commission-making impulse—devoted to sharply distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor—in the colonial heartlands of empire, such as Java, the emphasis was elsewhere. Ben- tham’s warning, as the two preceding chapters should make clear, might easily have read: “Banish race, you banish wealth.”

It was the political effects of how race should be assessed that had to be sorted out first.

It took another twenty-five years for the European Pauperism Commission of 1901 to ask about what its members, too, assumed they knew. As we shall see, this new commission was quicker to learn—from the vehement intensity of the response to their queries—that what they feigned not to know was dangerous and that what they thought they knew, they did not.

Rather than carrying out a detailed investigation, the commission worked off what its members claim to have heard, incidents of which they “knew,” sometimes what they witnessed themselves, but more often what was “commonly” known and said.

The retort of the Minister of Colonies was sharp and clear: staatszorg (state care) was not to replace moederzorg (mother- care). Education was in the state’s jurisdiction, upbringing of small children was not.

In this molten social landscape, people were transgressing both moral and spatial boundaries, living where they were said not to be “at home,” where fair-skinned adults and children “did not belong.” Below the purview of government surveillance and its documentary practices—birth certificates, housing permits, and legal declarations of male paternity— had emerged a muddled social space occupied by men and women with “light hair,” and by “blue-eyed” children who were vagrants or beggars, living homeless or in hovels on the outskirts of European neighborhoods or in native compounds.

For colonial observers they were a plight and too present; for postcolonial historians they remained peripheral to the colonial stories they have chosen to tell. In the archives they are in both obvious and unexpected places: in the fixed frames of colonial history, they emerge and submerge, get “lost” in changing nomenclatures and sometimes cannot be “seen” at all.

The full commission thus endorsed a proposed revision of the trespassing laws to include a house and “its premises”—that is, the land that made up the compound.

One can no longer speak of ruler and ruled in this time, as people are all the same. That a European has greater needs than a native, cannot be claimed. It certainly cannot be said of those Europeans, who by descent and character stand so very close to the native.

Statistics collected during the 1930 Indies census estimated that three-quarters of those classified as European were of partial native origin.

Concubinage, one focus of the earlier commission, was here the cornerstone on which other issues were to revolve and from which the final recommendations followed, for it was concubinage, especially as prac- ticed in the military barracks, that had produced families in which native mothers were unequipped to properly rear their wayward Indo young.

The questions were grounded in an epistemology of race that conjoined a physical definition of race (hair-, skin-, and eye color) with one that relied on comportment, disposition, and moral character.

What the commission, in the end, collected were starkly different forms of knowledge: on the one hand, a compendium of elite beliefs about racial types, and received common sense about Indos and lower-class whites; on the other hand, de- tails of survival and material need that pierced the conventions of the pre- scribed narratives.

Pauperism in the Indies is a more complicated, intricate phenomenon than in Europe. In Europe it is almost exclusively a question of livelihood and housing; in the Indies it is about the distance that separates ruler from ruled.

Compassion was selective, and often came with a distorted twist. For what was always left unsaid in these vignettes was the starkest fact of all: that these conditions of life, with people perched precariously at the edges of need, were the common conditions in which a majority of land-poor Javanese lived in rural areas and in urban slums.

Race thrived as a vital political concept and accrued power in its updated form. It distinguished the cultural coordinates of those with the capacity to participate in the intimate and public practices of Europe- an privilege, even as it disenfranchised those who could not claim echte (real), zuivere (pure) full-blooded membership.

Histories bury themselves deep in words. So do causal narratives.

In 1947 when the death rate of Indos in Japanese internment camps was found to be much greater than that of full-blooded Europeans, it was again attributed to the Indos’ “weaker moral fibre.”

Was the Luhmann murder an isolated incident or, as Valck contended, part of a patterned response to European abuse? The identity of the assailants was far from clear. Were they ethnic Gayo woodcutters or Javanese estate workers, were they estate workers set on revenge against their employer or guerilla supporters of the ongoing Aceh War to the north?

Some dichotomies crumbled in the face of acts that were both personal and political. Some cut across the ethnic distinctions Dutch authorities encouraged and to which they so confidently prescribed—the imagining of primordial loyalties that in other places and other moments had served them well.

Partial understandings, epistemic confusion, and undigested bits of cultural “information” made up the modus vivendi of high and low civil servants across the Indies—of those traipsing through Deli planta- tions, isolated in Bali outposts, cloistered in the bowels of the state’s archives in Batavia, or even sheltered in its most iconic “house of glass,” the Governor-General’s palatial dwelling in Buitenzorg, encased in botani- cal grounds. Here I start from another tack: from the premise that these discrepant stories provide ethnographic entry into the confused space in which people lived, to the fragmented and incomplete knowledge on which they relied, and to the ill-informed and inept responses that knowl- edge engendered. Coherence is seductive for narrative form but disparities are, from an ethnographic perspective, more compelling.

Gaps in their knowledge were filled with culturally reasonable conjectures that made their reports persuasive, relevant, and racially plausible to immediate superiors and high officials, whom they knew or imagined would be their readers in Batavia and The Hague. Plantation “unrest” had a hydraulic lexicon of its own: “coolie out- bursts” were “instinctual responses” of revenge or orchestrated actions by “outside agitators” imposed on a duped and otherwise passive population. As such, not all accounts made their way to the top. Some dropped out as reports were consolidated, summarized, and pared down. Others were em- bellished with detail as they were cribbed and sifted as they made their way up the administrative ladder. It was this “cribbing” process that determined which readings of events became part of the evidential package.

Not least important to the credibility of these accounts were shared be- liefs about the psychological and physical vulnerabilities of whites in the tropics. These were beliefs that called more on Lamarckian notions of ac- quired character than on the biological surety of race. Europeans were susceptible to cultural and moral contamination by those degraded whites within their midst and by those they were there to manage and rule.

In Deli, it shaped what people thought they knew, blurring the boundaries between events that could be claimed to have been “witnessed” and those envisioned, be- tween performed brutality and the potential for it.

By allowing workers to choose twelve days in prison in lieu of repaying their advances or working the full duration of their contracts, Valck had (inadvertently?) undercut an unspoken principle of the indenture system that provided no easy way out or quick exit from the onerous contracts and debt peonage that kept work- ers on the estates.

When military agents “discovered” jungle encampments on the plantation peripheries, they found refuges that were not limited to ex-Chinese coolies in one place and Gayo resistance fighters in another. Instead they came upon encampments with material traces (utensils, clothing, letters) of hundreds of Gayos, Malays, Chinese, and Javanese hiding out together in makeshift shelters. … This “vagabond” population refused to work for the estates, but instead lived off them, carrying out night raids in search of food, weapons, clothing, and cash. “Vagabondage” was an administrative misnomer for an unrecogniz- able social space—one occupied by a diverse underclass made up of those rejected from the estates, who fled the estates, or who chose to maintain equivocal, temporary, or predatory ties to them.

The fact that there is no trace of these encampments in the colonial his- toriography of Sumatra’s East Coast—or in more recent histories—merits reflection. Colonial historiography arguably followed the administrative maps that demarcated Aceh from Deli and that distinguished what was feared to be a belligerent “Islamic stronghold” from a region of intensive capitalist venture. But these distinctions made for purpose of governance were not maintained in practice.

In offi- cial missives the terms “Gayo” and “Acehnese” were distinguished in some accounts, but used interchangeably in others. How did Valck and his fellow reporters know how to tell a Gayo thief in the night from an Acehnese dis- sident? As we shall see, these terms often served to mark not ethnic identity but the degree of threat to this new colonial enterprise, those whose actions were to be classified as “common criminal” or “insurgent rebel.”

The following day when Petambiang returned to tell Droop that the work had been completed and he now expected his pay, Droop did not agree but decided to consider the work finished as long as they returned his tools. Again he was warned that the Gayos would attack his estate and murder him that night. Droop only prepared his weapons and, not trust- ing his subordinates with his four guns, kept them in the house.

Rumors seemed to have moved up and down the east coast of Sumatra with enormous speed—far faster than official reports—suggesting that these kinds of knowledge traveled more deftly than others. And rumors voiced the possible.

Sometimes political grammars constrained what colonial agents thought, sometimes those grammars delimited the political idioms in which people talked, indicating not what they thought but only what they said.

Not least, they assiduously refuse recognition of comparisons, convergences, and accommodations that might compromise and implicate ourselves.

Imperial dispositions are composed of trained habits of attention channeled through principles of plausibility and rules of relevance. These are politicized cognitions and practices that distinguish sensory overloads from sensible acts.

The letters course through colonial concerns but as many do not. Still, empire is the watermark of these relations. Somehow they always return to an uncle just returned from Java, a niece marrying the son of a former colonial officer, an inade- quate pension, a bolt of cloth lost in voyage, a tobacco or sugar stock that crashed, a squabble that endures continental divides.

These are love letters de- signed to instill attachment, to capture the taste of her childhood in which he takes no part, to create rather than affirm a closeness for the little girl who will grow into a young woman while he is away.

His discrepant messages combine high morals and bold indif- ference, callousness and compassion, utter effectualness and power, de- pression and racialized distaste. They remind us that Valck’s humanist in- dignations and disregard were both nourished by colonial politics, were lived through those politics and on its edges. His first promotion occurred on Bali’s north coast, when he took a small part in blowing the whistle on the collusion of a Dutch official and a local regent. His demise followed his indictment of Deli’s European planters and high-ranking colonial offi- cials in Batavia who turned their backs on what they knew. But even within this do-good bent, the colonized appear with only walk-on roles. It is a sobering reminder of Salman Rushdie’s warning that if colonial his- tory has been written with the colonized as bit players, that gives no li- cense for contemporary historians to do the same.

Two years after her arrival at Kemanglen, she writes her father with ex- pectant excitement. The arrival of more frequent French mailboats will allow them to finally “coordinate” their letters. Here is her response to his previous letter of a month earlier, arriving three days after hers had left. … I am busy sewing my household linen. Also kabaai must be made as I am planning to start wearing sarong and kabaai. Of course, only in the mornings, when I have to do the household chores. In the evening I will always keep dressing: I don’t want to adopt that bad habit.

Why have the Lucassen women become so hostile to her? Are they as dis- dainful of her clinging to European pretensions as she is of their Indische ways?

Her oldest son becomes the genealogist who deposits hers and her father’s letters in the genealogi- cal bureau in The Hague. Her second son becomes an entomologist. Her only daughter marries the French Marquis de Seilhac. No further genera- tions are born in Java. No one returns to the Indies. Investments are transferred to African plantations. Before Indonesia’s independence, the Kemanglen estates are already sold. The watermark of empire is scratched over and etched out of their lives.

“Information” is there—in abundance. It depends on what kinds of things we imagine such an archive could allow us to know. In this letter- writing trove of Frans Carl Valck, his daughter Susanna, and their acquain- tances and family, no documents could offer thicker evidence of the veins of commitment, disregard, obligation, and investment that pulsed through their concerns and bound the life-force of personhoods and politics to- gether. But clarity about what Valck “really felt” about living in empire and off its rewards is elusive at best. Family letters provide a personalized and ethnographic inflection in a minor key, not the crescendo of major chords, but the plaintive notes in which things may not be felt as they seem to be.

The noun “ignorance” and the verb “to ignore” share a social and legal etymology, where definition of the former, “want of knowledge,” is pred- icated on the definition of the latter active, verbal form, “to refuse to take notice of.” How these two are joined, what political measures and psy- chic processes produce subjectivities that instantiate both, is a condition of imperial histories we would do well not to ignore. Both continue to haunt the logos and pathos of empire. Both inform what Mary Douglas called “those shadowed places” that states and more expansive proce- dures of governance protect.