Colonial officials took up Oriental studies out of boredom
Evidence
If there was a connection between nineteenth-century imperialism and Orientalism, it was chiefly this – that imperial servants, lonely and bored in remote outposts, took up the study of exotic languages and histories as their hobby. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 264
Categorization
- XREF: Directly challenges the strong thesis in Said’s Orientalism that scholarship was an instrument of power; here the motivation is loneliness in remote outposts — a humanizing, contingent origin.
Related
- Imperial ambition converted scholarly Orientalist study into active colonization (similarity 0.82)
- Colonial administrators framed Orientalist knowledge as essential to maintaining empire. (similarity 0.80)
- Colonial expansion made alien cultures interpretable in the first place (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalist knowledge became institutionalized expertise spanning universities, ministries, and popular media. (similarity 0.79)
- Colonial scholarship masks imperial agendas behind a veneer of objectivity. (similarity 0.79)
- Oriental studies were reframed as instruments of national postwar policy, not scholarship (similarity 0.78)
- Sustained national imperial interest was required for Orientalist scholarship to thrive (similarity 0.78)
- Orientalist scholarship functioned as working equipment for imperial rule. (similarity 0.78)