Colonial administrators updated medieval Orientalist schemata into an engine to transform the Orient

Evidence

In fact Napoleon, de Lesseps, Cromer, and Balfour are far more regular, far less unusual, if we recall the schemata of d’Herbelot and Dante and add to them both a modernized, efficient engine (like the nineteenth-century European empire) and a positive twist: since one cannot ontologically obliterate the Orient (as d’Herbelot and Dante perhaps realized), one does have the means to capture it, treat it, describe it, improve it, radically alter it. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 265

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reader’s Addendum on sacrifice/governance themes and to the biopolitics toolkit: the colonial administration as a ‘modernized, efficient engine’ for managing a population.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 265