Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign introduced large-scale advance textual preparation to Orientalist projects

Evidence

It was characteristic of all Orientalist projects before Napoleon’s that very little could be done in advance of the project to prepare for its success. Anquetil and Jones, for example, learned what they did about the Orient only after they got there. They were confronting, as it were, the whole Orient, and only after a while and after considerable improvising could they whittle it down to a smaller province. Napoleon, on the other hand, wanted nothing less than to take the whole of Egypt, and his advance preparations were of unparalleled magnitude and thoroughness. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 206

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the contrast between pre-Napoleonic Orientalists who improvised after arrival and Napoleon’s systematic advance preparation — a turning point in the field’s history.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffolding work on how colonial knowledge-production precedes and enables conquest — anticipates later readings on Orientalism as a regime of anticipatory knowledge. — connects to: Napoleon’s 1798 invasion inaugurated the systematic use of scholarly knowledge to serve empire
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 206