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.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 583