Racial ideology matured only with military capacity and took a capitalist gloss.
Evidence
Orientalism as a colonial discourse could reach maturity only after England had acquired the military and technological capacity to dominate the world. Its actual ability to build a vast empire that stretched the globe created the conditions for a form of racialization that had previously existed as stereotypes in the literary sphere to become a dominant ideology of colonization. This ideology, however, did not get reproduced exactly since it was shaped by the conditions of the post-Enlightenment period becoming more secular in orientation. While the “savage” Indian was interchangeable with the “savage” Muslim going back to the seventeenth century, as Matar argues, late eighteenth and nineteenth century racialization acquired a more capitalist gloss, with commercial needs eclipsing the drive to conversion, a hallmark of early modern imperialism. The eighteenth century English author, Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe fame, captured this shift in his call for British domination of Muslim lands based not on Christian zeal but market needs. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 153
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Supports the reader’s content-agnostic-versus-capitalism-specific question: the shift from Christian zeal to market needs marks capitalism giving the discrimination its specific modern frame.
Related
- Stereotypes become dominant colonial ideology only once empire gains material power (similarity 0.87)
- English empire turned literary anti-Muslim stereotypes into dominant colonization ideology (similarity 0.87)
- Eighteenth-century British imperial ideology shifted from conversion to market motives. (similarity 0.82)
- The racialization of Muslims was anchored in Enlightenment-era colonial ideologies (similarity 0.82)
- Even anti-racist Orientalists held fixed cultural essences for the racialized (similarity 0.81)
- Orientalist scholarship varied internally but shared the racial category (similarity 0.80)
- Economic transition to capitalist imperialism produced Muslims as a racial category (similarity 0.80)
- Racialization of Muslims is historically discontinuous and empire-contingent. (similarity 0.79)
- Capitalism capped the reach of Enlightenment emancipation through racialized colonial rule (similarity 0.79)
- Anti-Muslim racialization awaited actual imperial domination, not just ideology (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalist scholarship conflates Muslims and Jews into one racial type (similarity 0.79)
- Capitalist imperialism’s denial of equality to colonized peoples produced Muslim racialization (similarity 0.79)
- Full anti-Muslim racism required both Enlightenment freedom ideology and European military dominance (similarity 0.79)
- Culture served as a racializing mode that displaced politics onto religion (similarity 0.79)
- Homo islamicus emerged from Enlightenment racial typologies hardened by eugenics-era essentialism (similarity 0.79)