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.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 440