If one could argue that the presence of European beggars and homeless Dutchmen in the streets of Batavia in the 1870s were “secrets” to those in the Netherlands, they certainly were not to European post office clerks, Javanese construction workers, or Chinese storekeepers who lived on the sprawling low-lying peripheries inhabited by the impoverished of Java’s urban centers.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 163