Subjects of Surveillance

This chapter examines how, during the late-colonial period in Java, new techniques of surveillance came to be applied to the control of persons, first in the domain of public health and then in the domain of policing. It shows how emerging biometric techniques, including anthropometry and fingerprinting, were first deployed within vaccination campaigns aimed at preventing contagions and how these formed the basis for what would eventually become an identity card for all individuals. The chapter then examines the history of colonial police reform to understand how the emerging surveillance regime related to longstanding practices of human surveillance as found in the neighborhood watch and spy networks. The analysis shows that late-colonial policing retained a distinctive dualism, with the bureaucratic logic of surveillance never fully displacing the state’s reliance on territorial authority.