Europe’s route to Indian riches necessarily crossed the Islamic world

Evidence

Access to Indian (Oriental) riches had always to be made by first crossing the Islamic provinces and by withstanding the dangerous effect of Islam as a system of quasi-Arian belief. And at least for the larger segment of the eighteenth century, Britain and France were successful. The Ottoman Empire had long since settled into a (for Europe) comfortable senescence, to be inscribed in the nineteenth century as the “Eastern Question.” Britain and France fought each other in India between 1744 and 1748 and again between 1756 and 1763, until, in 1769, the British emerged in practical economic and political control of the subcontinent. What was more inevitable than that Napoleon should choose to harass Britain’s Oriental empire by first intercepting its Islamic through-way, Egypt? — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 199

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘Eastern Question’ framing and the Ottoman-as-senescent trope feed directly into later readings on the construction of the Orient as backward and passive.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 199