Colonial expansion made alien cultures interpretable in the first place

Evidence

Besides, how does one interpret another culture unless prior circumstances have made that culture available for interpretation in the first place? And these circumstances, so far as the European interest in alien cultures is concerned, have always been commercial, colonial, or military expansion, conquest, empire. Even when Orientalist scholars in nineteenth-century German universities studied Sanskrit, codified the hadith, or explained the caliphate, they relied less on the fiction of pure curiosity than on the universities themselves, the libraries, other scholars, the social rewards that made their careers possible. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 308

Categorization

• XREF: The load-bearing claim of Orientalism — knowledge is enabled (and compromised) by imperial power relations. Directly parallels MacKenzie’s counterarguments in Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts.
• ADDENDUM: Complements the trees-as-infrastructure essay’s framing of scholarly knowledge as materially embedded infrastructure — here universities and libraries are the substrate of ‘pure’ scholarship.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the paradigm-shifting core of the chapter: the claim that interest always derives from prior material circumstances, not disinterested curiosity, repudiates the entire myth of pure knowledge.

Related

• European curiosity about alien cultures grew from trade, conquest, and need (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalist scholarship expanded in tandem with European imperial conquest. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism’s institutional growth tracked European colonial expansion from 1815 to 1914 (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial expansion widened geographic knowledge but kept Europe at the privileged center (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial expansion and Orientalist essentializing emerged together in the nineteenth century. (similarity 0.82)
• The colonized colonizer outlook emerged fully by the 1870s (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism was a project of power and culture, not merely an academic enterprise (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholarship supplied the knowledge base that justified colonial rule (similarity 0.82)
• Studying other cultures without repression requires rethinking knowledge and power (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial institutions on the ground, not scholarly texts, transformed Islamic learning itself (similarity 0.82)
• Imperial ambition converted scholarly Orientalist study into active colonization (similarity 0.82)
• Islam was the default framework through which Europe first knew all of the Orient (similarity 0.82)
• European knowledge of the Orient shifted from textual contemplation to administrative and military appropriation (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism expanded from scholarly practice to signify imperialist ideology (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism metamorphosed from scholarly discourse into an imperial institution (similarity 0.81)