European knowledge of the Orient shifted from textual contemplation to administrative and military appropriation

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Useful definition of the ‘incorporation and assimilation’ mechanism: the transformation of Orientalist knowledge from contemplative to administrative.
• XREF: This maps onto the Foucault-era discussion of knowledge-power, and onto the Islamophobia field’s claim that scholarship was infrastructure for colonial rule. — connects to: European knowledge of the Orient assembled a restricted archive of tropes that controlled novelty; Orient studies served Europe’s needs, not Asia’s reality; Colonial expansion widened geographic knowledge but kept Europe at the privileged center (+13 more)
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 522

Broader Connections

• Western scholarly discourse about the Orient was entangled with colonial domination #corroborates (0.88) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 206
• Orientalist knowledge cycles into control over an Orient it activated #corroborates (0.82)
• Europe defined itself through a material and cultural image of the Orient #corroborates (0.78) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52