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This article examines the orphanage in Batavia during the eighteenth century as an instrument of colonial and social control. Using archival sources from the diaconate and VOC, it argues that the orphanage systematically separated children of European Christian men and non-Christian local women from their mothers and raised them within a strict Dutch Reformed regime. The institution served to ensure the preservation of a European Protestant community by preventing religious apostasy and by providing Dutch Reformed marriage partners for European men to combat widespread concubinage. A key finding is the gradual shift during the eighteenth century from concerns about European heritage and religion to increasingly racialized concerns for ‘European blood’. The orphanage thus became a key site where racial and religious hierarchies were reproduced through child separation, discipline and marriage policy. Colonial rule was based on the concept of European and Dutch Reformed superiority, by which these children had to be separated from the rest of the population.