Europe’s 19th-century superiority over Asia was contingent, not eternal

Evidence

Said’s accusation that Marx subscribed to the basic Orientalist idea of the superiority of the West over the East seems to derive plausibility only from the ambiguity underlying his own discussion of this matter. That 19th century Europe was superior to Asia and much of the rest of the world in terms of productive capacities, social organisation, historical ascendency, military might and scientific and technological development is indisputable as a contingent historical fact. Orientalism, with its ahistorical bourgeois bent of mind, did its best to eternalise this mutable fact, to turn it into a permanent reality past, present and future. Hence Orientalism’s essentialistic ontology of East and West. Marx, like anyone else, knew of the superiority of modern Europe over the Orient. But to accuse a radically historicist thinker such as Marx of turning this contingent fact into a necessary reality for all time is simply absurd. — Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse, 83

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Said’s Orientalism; the historicist-vs-essentialist distinction echoes the grafting essay’s theme of mutable vs eternalized systems. — connects to: Europe achieved hegemony only through mercantile imperialism and capitalism, not inherent superiority — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 103; European economic and cultural backwardness, not superiority, preceded its hegemony
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Said actually equivocate here, or does al-‘Azm overstate the ambiguity in his text?

Related

• Europe achieved hegemony only through mercantile imperialism and capitalism, not inherent superiority (similarity 0.82)
• European hegemony resulted from economic and imperial factors, not inherent Western superiority (similarity 0.81)
• Said traces imperial conquest back to centuries-old Western habits of representing the Orient (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism rests on a fixed distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist scholarship framed East-West difference as modernity versus ancient tradition (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s timeless conception of orientalism actually undermined his anti-imperialist stance (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism’s essentialism hides both historical change and the Orientalist’s interests (similarity 0.80)
• The Occident-Orient binary describes contested interpretations, not real monolithic blocks (similarity 0.79)
• Othering and essentialism predate and exceed Europe; colonial capitalism gave them world-historical force (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism’s error is essentializing both Orient and West from above (similarity 0.79)
• European cultural hegemony rests on the idea of European superiority (similarity 0.79)
• Conflating all Western knowledge production with Orientalism repeats essentialism and obscures historical specificity (similarity 0.79)
• European economic and cultural backwardness, not superiority, preceded its hegemony (similarity 0.79)
• The Orientalist’s role shifted from guild scholar to representative of Western supremacy. (similarity 0.79)
• Said’s critique essentializes the West as much as it claims Orientalists essentialize the East (similarity 0.79)