Nineteenth-century Orientalism framed language study as the evolutionary development of the human mind.

Evidence

Oriental scholarship, as Edward Said has shown, grew in importance in the nineteenth century with the growth of European commercial and colonial interest in the Orient. If the expansion of Orientalism was due to the position of the Orient within Europe’s expanding power, the strength of Oriental studies was also due to the position of this Orient within the patterns of nineteenth-century European knowledge. Since the end of the preceding century, to know a thing had come to involve knowing the stages of its internal development, its ‘history’ in the new sense of that word. This was true of the two pioneering nineteenth-century sciences, geology, which had unfolded the life-history of the earth, and biology, which had unfolded the life-history of the physical organism. It was equally true for the life-history of the human mind, whose unfolding was Orientalism. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 437

Categorization

• XREF: Builds directly on Said’s Orientalism thesis; also connects to Mitchell’s broader argument about how colonial knowledge disciplines its object. — connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”