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.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 836