British imperial records manufactured the Wahhabi piracy trope.

Evidence

Scholarship has often been misguided by the official British records resulting in the categorisation of maritime violence as ‘Qawaim piracy’ inspired by the concept of fanatical Wahhabism. … The aim of this piece is therefore to emphasise that conventional historical explanations of ‘piratical’ Arab groups supposedly motivated by fanatical Wahhabism is an invention of British imperial discourse and is not an adequate explanation of the rise of maritime conflict in the nineteenth century. — Robin Alexander Plant, Discuss the Relationship Between…, 5

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle on how imperial archives are not neutral records but generators of the categories historians then inherit — the ‘phantom’ is an archival artefact.
• XREF: Echoes Said’s Orientalism and the broader archival-power literature on colonial knowledge production.