Orientalist texts functioned as practical handbooks for European conquest

Evidence

Volney’s assessment was both shrewd and hard to fault since it was clear to Napoleon, as it would be to anyone who read Volney, that his Voyage and the Considérations were effective texts to be used by any European wishing to win in the Orient. In other words, Volney’s work constituted a handbook for attenuating the human shock a European might feel as he directly experienced the Orient: Read the books, seems to have been Volney’s thesis, and far from being disoriented by the Orient, you will compel it to you. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 208

Categorization

• XREF: The idea that prior textual knowledge ‘attenuates the shock’ and lets the European ‘compel’ the Orient connects to how orientalism constructs reality for its consumers — a key mechanism for later Islamophobia readings.
• DEFINE: Pinpoints the mechanism by which textual representation becomes a tool of mastery — reading as preparation for domination.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 208