Veenhuizen, an agricultural “colony” for the criminalized poor, is a well-known national historic site in the Netherlands; it is as much a monument to early- nineteenth-century utopian socialist idealism as it is a Dickensian poorhouse, a warehouse for the disenfranchised. Its founder, Johannes van den Bosch, is better known outside the Netherlands for his activities on a different colonial stage as the architect of the Cultivation System, a system of forced crop deliveries by which the Dutch extracted coffee, sugar and indigo from large parts of Java, Sumatra and Minahasa in the mid-nineteenth century. These apparently disparate examples of Van den Bosch's “colonialism” represent more than successive moments in the life of a precocious royal favorite. If we are to take seriously the injunction to “treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field” (Stoler and Cooper 1989:4), we need to focus on the historically specific colonial discourses introduced by figures like Van den Bosch through which “population[s] of degenerate types” were subjected to similar “systems of administration and instruction” (Bhabba 1990:75) in both overseas empires and the newly-conquered territories that were becoming the cores of emerging European nation-states. Veenhuizen and the Cultivation System are the products of a particular strand of colonial discourse that provided new forms of social control in the name of economic development. By focusing on the continuities in the underlying economic ideas that tie these two cases together, I underscore the divergent paths by which social welfare legislation was used in the English and Dutch colonial empires to create and discipline their respective agrarian capitalist regimes. By concentrating on Van den Bosch's Dutch experiments in poverty relief, the role of colonial discourses in forming the metropole is also highlighted. The Dutch state was as much shaped by its imperial project as the colony itself was transformed by European hegemony. This is an example, in other words, of “multi-sited ethnography,” by which the underlying logic of an emerging world system is revealed through the embedded idioms and discourses of local cultural formations (Marcus 1998:97).