Colonizing meant creating interests that then justified occupation

Evidence

By the end of the nineteenth century these achievements were materially abetted by the European occupation of the entire Near Orient (with the exception of parts of the Ottoman Empire, which was swallowed up after 1918). The principal colonial powers once again were Britain and France, although Russia and Germany played some role as well. To colonize meant at first the identification—indeed, the creation—of interests; these could be commercial, communicational, religious, military, cultural. With regard to Islam and the Islamic territories, for example, Britain felt that it had legitimate interests, as a Christian power, to safeguard. A complex apparatus for tending these interests developed. Such early organizations as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1698) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701) were succeeded and later abetted by the Baptist Missionary Society (1792), the Church Missionary Society (1799), the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews (1808). These missions “openly joined the expansion of Europe.” Add to these the trading societies, learned societies, geographical exploration funds, translation funds, the implantation in the Orient of schools, missions, consular offices, factories, and sometimes large European communities, and the notion of an “interest” will acquire a good deal of sense. Thereafter interests were defended with much zeal and expense. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 276

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how later Islamophobia readings treat the ‘interest’-justifying-mission logic, and to the British missionary/colonial apparatus that frames contemporary discussions of Islam in the West.
• SEED: The ‘identification—indeed, the creation—of interests’ mechanism is a clean analytical model for an essay on how contemporary policy ‘interests’ in the Muslim world are likewise constructed, not merely discovered.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 276