Colonial knowledge-gathering fused governance questions with totalizing encyclopedic cataloguing

Evidence

For his personal work, entitled “Objects of Enquiry During My Residence in Asia” he enumerated among the topics of his investigation “the Laws of the Hindus and Mohammedans, Modern Politics and Geography of Hindustan, Best Mode of Governing Bengal, Arithmetic and Geometry, and Mixed Sciences of the Asiaticks, Medicine, Chemistry, Surgery, and Anatomy of the Indians, Natural Productions of India, Poetry, Rhetoric and Morality of Asia, Music of the Eastern Nations, Trade, Manufacture, Agriculture, and Commerce of India,” and so forth. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 202

Categorization

• QUESTION: The juxtaposition of ‘Best Mode of Governing Bengal’ alongside ‘Music of the Eastern Nations’ in one enquiry list — the instrumental-administrative and the aesthetic-comparative fused in one Orientalist project.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 202
• XREF: connects to: Colonial extraction logics are structurally recapitulated in contemporary data platforms — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 346; MPS fused disciplines and professions into a transacademic knowledge machine beyond single disciplines — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 86