European knowledge of the Orient assembled a restricted archive of tropes that controlled novelty

Evidence

Unlike the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52 (#expands, via linked claim)

I spoke earlier of incorporation and assimilation of the Orient, as these activities were practiced by writers as different from each other as Dante and d’Herbelot. Clearly there is a difference between those efforts and what, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become a truly formidable European cultural, political, and material enterprise. The nineteenth-century colonial “scramble for Africa” was by no means limited to Africa, of course. Neither was the penetration of the Orient entirely a sudden, dramatic afterthought following years of scholarly study of Asia. What we must reckon with is a long and slow process of appropriation by which Europe, or the European awareness of the Orient, transformed itself from being textual and contemplative into being administrative, economic, and even military. The fundamental change was a spatial and geographical one, or rather it was a change in the quality of geographical and spatial apprehension so far as the Orient was concerned. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 522 (#expands, via linked claim)

And indeed the vocabulary of specialized power and acquisition is particularly associated with Sacy’s reputation as a pioneer Orientalist. His heroism as a scholar was to have dealt successfully with insurmountable difficulties; he acquired the means to present a field to his students where there was none. He made the books, the precepts, the examples, said the Duc de Broglie of Sacy. The result was the production of material about the Orient, methods for studying it, and exempla that even Orientals did not have. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 341 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Accumulated empirical knowledge does not dispel imaginative geographical knowledge — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 156; European knowledge of the Orient shifted from textual contemplation to administrative and military appropriation — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 522; The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse (+6 more)

Related

• Knowledge of the Orient requires conceiving it as ruled by Europe (similarity 0.92)
• Europe’s literary repertoire of the Orient half-imagined settings and figures. (similarity 0.91)
• European knowledge of the Orient shifted from textual contemplation to administrative and military appropriation (similarity 0.90)
• Europe’s doubt about Oriental novelty serves as its cultural weapon (similarity 0.90)
• Orientalist scholarship produced knowledge about the Orient that Orientals themselves did not possess (similarity 0.88)
• Europe defined itself through a material and cultural image of the Orient (similarity 0.88)
• Orient studies served Europe’s needs, not Asia’s reality (similarity 0.88)
• British imperial presence was conceived as permanently transforming the Orient (similarity 0.87)
• Western scholarly handling turned the Orient from alien into colonial space (similarity 0.86)
• European knowledge about the Orient served domination rather than truth. (similarity 0.86)
• Eighteenth-century comparative history confronted the Orient partly to know Europe itself (similarity 0.86)
• British control of the Orient depended on constantly refined knowledge of it (similarity 0.86)
• Europeans claimed to possess the Orient’s souls beyond territorial power (similarity 0.86)
• The word ‘Oriental’ alone invoked a fixed, unchallengeable body of knowledge (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalism expanded from scholarly practice to signify imperialist ideology (similarity 0.85)

Broader Connections

• European knowledge of the Orient shifted from textual contemplation to administrative and military appropriation #expands (0.85) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 522
• Europe defined itself through a material and cultural image of the Orient #expands (0.85) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse #expands (0.80)
• Orientalist scholarship produced knowledge about the Orient that Orientals themselves did not possess #expands (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 341
• Europe’s literary repertoire of the Orient half-imagined settings and figures. #exemplifies (0.78)
• Orientalist knowledge cycles into control over an Orient it activated #expands (0.75)