Colonial administrators framed Orientalist knowledge as essential to maintaining empire.

Evidence

Curzon argued for Oriental studies as part of the British responsibility to the Orient. On September 27, 1909, he told the House of Lords that our familiarity, not merely with the languages of the people of the East but with their customs, their feelings, their traditions, their history and religion, our capacity to understand what may be called the genius of the East, is the sole basis upon which we are likely to be able to maintain in the future the position we have won, and no step that can be taken to strengthen that position can be considered undeserving of the attention of His Majesty’s Government or of a debate in the House of Lords. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 531

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the foundational claim that Orientalism is a discourse of power/knowledge serving imperial control, echoing Foucault’s power-knowledge and anticipating the Islamophobia readings where expertise legitimizes surveillance. — connects to: Colonial administrators framed imperialism as enlightened cosmopolitanism — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 364
• SEED: A direct quote chain showing how academic disciplines (SOAS) were founded explicitly as imperial furniture - an essay angle on the colonial genealogy of area studies departments.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 531