He argues that the historiography dealing with differentiating practices in colonial Indonesia has tended to overemphasize the importance of racial delineations. As a result, it has become a widely accepted truism that colonial societies were obsessed with defining a clear dichotomy between ‘ruler’ and ‘ruled’—‘European’ and ‘native’. But as Luttikhuis shows, colonial actors actually preferred to think in many shades of grey.
KITLV.