British control of India sharpened English writers’ political vision of the Near East

Evidence

English writers on the whole had a more pronounced and harder sense of what Oriental pilgrimages might entail than the French. India was a valuably real constant in this sense, and therefore all the territory between the Mediterranean and India acquired a correspondingly weighty importance. Romantic writers like Byron and Scott consequently had a political vision of the Near Orient and a very combative awareness of how relations between the Orient and Europe would have to be conducted. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 492

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the mechanism by which imperial possession alters literary perception of adjacent territory — a core scaffolding concept.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 492