No civilization other than the West produced an organized scholarly apparatus for studying others

Evidence

There should not be any doubt whatsoever that no other culture or civilization in world history has produced such a phenomenon, not even the exquisitely bookish and erudite Islamic civilization that—as I will show—came to an effective end upon Europe’s colonial encounter in the nineteenth century. Nor did the great Chinese dynasties during the episodic heights of their power, when, for instance, during the early fifteenth century AD, their notorious imperial fleet navigated the oceans down to Madagascar, if not much farther, and returned home, having annihilated pirate ships and carried back exotic flora and foreign emissaries, only to be left to rot in China’s ports. Neither on the fleet nor in the home country were there scholars studying the Indian Ocean and the coasts of Africa—much less their surrounds and even less the entire hemisphere—who constituted an organized contingent, a discursive discipline, an academic institution, or something similar. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 139

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s interest in pre-state trade institutions and how civilizations do or do not develop formal apparatuses for cross-cultural interaction.
• CANDY: The Ming fleet reaching Madagascar then rotting in harbor is a striking, low-context historical anecdote worth sharing.