Field operatives translated academic Orientalism into practical imperial effectiveness.

Evidence

Their role, however, was not to scant academic Orientalism, nor to subvert it, but rather to make it effective. In their genealogy were people like Lane and Burton, as much for their encyclopedic autodidacticism as for the accurate, the quasi-scholarly knowledge of the Orient they had obviously deployed when dealing with or writing about Orientals. For the curricular study of the Orient they substituted a sort of elaboration of latent Orientalism, which was easily available to them in the imperial culture of their epoch. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 562

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates ‘latent Orientalism’ as something transmissible and available in imperial culture rather than an academic discipline — a key scaffold term for the reader’s toolkit.
• XREF: Latent vs. manifest Orientalism definitional distinction threads into how Said frames representation of the ‘Other’ in later Islamophobia readings.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 562