British possession of India constrained imaginative writing about the Orient

Evidence

Consider first the differences between an English speaker and a French speaker. For the former the Orient was India, of course, an actual British possession; to pass through the Near Orient was therefore to pass en route to a major colony. Already, then, the room available for imaginative play was limited by the realities of administration, territorial legality, and executive power. Scott, Kinglake, Disraeli, Warburton, Burton, and even George Eliot (in whose Daniel Deronda the Orient has plans made for it) are writers, like Lane himself and Jones before him, for whom the Orient was defined by material possession, by a material imagination, as it were. England had defeated Napoleon, evicted France: what the English mind surveyed was an imperial domain which by the 1880s had become an unbroken patch of British-held territory, from the Mediterranean to India. To write about Egypt, Syria, or Turkey, as much as traveling in them, was a matter of touring the realm of political will, political management, political definition. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 428

Categorization

• XREF: The material/bureaucratic determination of imagination connects to the reader’s scaffolding interest: how colonial administration and territorial legality shape representation — a mechanism later Islamophobia readings posit for the modern state. — connects to: Imperial literature paired the railway and the nautch girl as paired cliches of India — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1978
• SEED: The contrast between English ‘material imagination’ and (implied) French imaginative play could anchor an essay on how imperial status differences shape literary Orientalism.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 428