Orientalist knowledge became institutionalized expertise spanning universities, ministries, and popular media.

Evidence

By the end of the nineteenth century, as Said has shown, knowledge of the Orient had become an expertise institutionalised in the centres of colonial administration, in government ministries, and in universities. This expertise, combined with images of the Orient in popular writing, entertainment, the press, government reports, guide books, travelogues and the memoires of colonial officials, came to form a broad discursive field, a vast theatre or exhibition of the real. Within this theatrical machinery, elaborate representations of the ‘objects’ of colonial authority could be produced. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 523