Rendering a land accessible to European scrutiny is itself a form of domination.

Evidence

But dealings with the Muslims were only a part of Napoleon’s project to dominate Egypt. The other part was to render it completely open, to make it totally accessible to European scrutiny. From being a land of obscurity and a part of the Orient hitherto known at second hand through the exploits of earlier travelers, scholars, and conquerors, Egypt was to become a department of French learning. Here too the textual and schematic attitudes are evident. The Institut, with its teams of chemists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, surgeons, and antiquarians, was the learned division of the army. Its job was no less aggressive: to put Egypt into modern French; and unlike the Abbé Le Mascrier’s 1735 Description de l’Égypte, Napoleon’s was to be a universal undertaking. Almost from the first moments of the occupation Napoleon saw to it that the Institut began its meetings, its experiments—its fact-finding mission, as we would call it today. Most important, everything said, seen, and studied was to be recorded, and indeed was recorded in that great collective appropriation of one country by another, the Description de l’Égypte, published in twenty-three enormous volumes between 1809 and 1828. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 221

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key mechanism: knowledge production — cataloguing, recording, describing — functions as the non-military half of colonial conquest.
• XREF: Directly prepares for how Islamophobia scholarship treats the production of knowledge about Muslims as part of power over them, in the Foucauldian knowledge-power sense.
• SEED: The Description de l’Égypte as an early case study of data collection as nation-scale appropriation — angle for how modern datasets classify and thereby govern populations.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 221