The concept of Oriental despotism was devised to justify European empire

Evidence

Like so many Orientalists who came after him, Anquetil-Duperron was fiercely anti-imperialist. In the introduction to another work, Le Despotisme considéré dans les trois états où il passe pour être, la Turquie, la Perse et l’Hindoustan, he expressed his fear that the concept of Oriental despotism had been summoned up by certain Western thinkers in order to justify the oppressive rule of Europeans over Asia. In many respects, Anquetil-Duperron antipated the main tenets of Said’s Orientalism, though Said, who discusses him, chooses not to mention this. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 223

Categorization

• SEED: An article angle: the eighteenth-century anti-imperialist roots of what’s now called postcolonial critique — Orientalism’s thesis predates Said by two centuries.
• XREF: Directly connects to Said’s Orientalism and complicates the standard narrative that anti-imperialist critique of Orientalism began with Said. — connects to: Delacroix depicted the Oriental despot as cruel, powerful, and sexually deviant; Orientalism first targeted England’s own aristocracy and poor before external targets; The Orientals-cannot-self-govern claim runs from Oriental despotism through modernization theory

Related

• The Orientals-cannot-self-govern claim runs from Oriental despotism through modernization theory (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalism first targeted England’s own aristocracy and poor before external targets (similarity 0.84)
• Anquetil-Duperron used Indian knowledge to refute Montesquieu’s Oriental despotism claims (similarity 0.84)
• Knowledge of the Orient requires conceiving it as ruled by Europe (similarity 0.83)
• The word ‘Oriental’ alone invoked a fixed, unchallengeable body of knowledge (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism was a project of power and culture, not merely an academic enterprise (similarity 0.82)
• Said traces imperial conquest back to centuries-old Western habits of representing the Orient (similarity 0.82)
• Said defines Orientalism as a Western instrument for dominating the Orient (similarity 0.82)
• Early Orientalist guilt contradicts Said’s imperialism thesis (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholarship includes anti-imperialist activists, not only empire-serving scholars (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholarship cannot be detached from its imperial context (similarity 0.82)
• Europe’s self-formation against an Other does not require an actual Orient (similarity 0.81)
• Orient studies served Europe’s needs, not Asia’s reality (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism operates as both an academic discipline and a repository of cultural images (similarity 0.81)