What could be taken for a failed creole nationalist impulse—a harden- ing conflict of interest between the Indies-born Dutch and those of the Netherlands—accentuated debates over who were full-fledged citizens and who were marginal variants. It also underscored a critical feature of the colonial state’s early formation—its commitment to consolidating a more clearly delineated politics of race. Max Müller’s observation that the British colonial state in India was devoted to a “conquest of the heart” might now seem obvious, but the fact that those arts of suasion were as firmly directed at distinguishing among colonizing agents as among col- onized subjects is not.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 588