Said’s imperialism critique only ever applies to Western empires.

Evidence

As he saw it, it was discourse and textual strategies that drove the imperial project and set up the rubber plantations, dug out the Suez Canal and established garrisons of legionnaires in the Sahara. Since Orientalism is by its nature a Western sickness, the same must be true of imperialism. The Persians, who under Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes built up a mighty empire and sought to add Greece to that empire, were not denounced by Said for imperialism. On the contrary, they were presented as the tragic and innocent victims of misrepresentation by Greek playwrights. Later the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids and Ottomans presided over great empires, but those dynasties escaped censure. Indeed, they were considered to be the victims of Western misrepresentation. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 515

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘imperialism is only a Western sickness’ asymmetry parallels similar single-standard failures in other identity-based critiques of colonial discourse.

Related

• Said traces imperial conquest back to centuries-old Western habits of representing the Orient (similarity 0.84)
• Persian imperialism needed no ideological othering to justify conquest (similarity 0.83)
• Said studied non-Western literature only as evidence of Western empire (similarity 0.82)
• Said’s Orientalism denies colonized agency while criticizing the West for silencing it. (similarity 0.82)
• Said presents colonial figures as products of Orientalist discourse rather than material interests (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s account makes colonialism an effect of discourse, not material power. (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s critique mirrored Orientalism by fixating on Western metropolitan culture (similarity 0.81)
• Arab critics attacked Said for stereotyping Orientalism and misrepresenting Islam (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s own critique essentialized the West by tracing Orientalism back to Homer (similarity 0.81)
• Said centrally shaped literary theory on colonialism after Orientalism (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism functioned as a Western self-projection requiring an invented East as its antithesis (similarity 0.80)
• The concept of Oriental despotism was devised to justify European empire (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s critique essentializes the West as much as it claims Orientalists essentialize the East (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptians learned empire by drawing sharper distinctions from Sudan (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism also suppressed Arab scholars and drew on Arab precursors (similarity 0.80)