Early Orientalist guilt contradicts Said’s imperialism thesis

Evidence

The chronological issue is of some importance, for if Aeschylus, Dante and Postel are to be indicted for Orientalism, it follows that the necessary linkage between Orientalism and imperialism that Said posits elsewhere cannot be true. Until the late seventeenth century at least, Europe was threatened by Ottoman imperialism and it is hard to date Western economic dominance of the Middle East to earlier than the late eighteenth century. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 513

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Irwin’s broader argument across the book that the West was long the weaker party facing Ottoman power.
• DEEPTHINKING: The clean logical contradiction here — if Orientalism predates imperialism, its causal tie to imperialism collapses — is worth dwelling on as it frames the whole debate.

Related

• Said’s static-views claim nullifies Orientalism’s own historical impact (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist scholarship cannot be detached from its imperial context (similarity 0.83)
• Said traces imperial conquest back to centuries-old Western habits of representing the Orient (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism is a political doctrine imposed because the Orient was weaker (similarity 0.82)
• The concept of Oriental despotism was devised to justify European empire (similarity 0.82)
• The origin date of Orientalism is contested among multiple competing candidates (similarity 0.82)
• Said’s Orientalism critique lacks the historical and geographical distinctions to define its target audience (similarity 0.81)
• Said never corrected factual errors in Orientalism and refused to concede points (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism functioned as a Western self-projection requiring an invented East as its antithesis (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s liberalism foreclosed any possibility that the Orient could instruct the West (similarity 0.80)
• Interwar decolonization struggles made the Orient a challenge to Western spirit and imperium (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist assumptions restrict non-Western history to relations with the West (similarity 0.80)
• Arab critics attacked Said for stereotyping Orientalism and misrepresenting Islam (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism justified colonial rule in advance, not after the fact (similarity 0.80)
• British, French, then American Orientalism follows the rise and fall of colonial empires (similarity 0.80)