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.”

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 814