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.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 1043