Orientalist training made historians better attuned to ethnicity than social scientists were

Evidence

It should be noted, however, that although these scholars did exemplify modern Middle East studies, they had all been trained as historians in the Orientalist tradition and would have been very familiar with Ottoman scholarship and the analytical centrality of the millet in the study of the region. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3488

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts the usual critique of Orientalism — here the Orientalist tradition supplied the analytical category (millet) that enabled accurate ethnic analysis, while ‘modern’ social science missed it.