The nineteenth-century composite Oriental lumped North Africa to India together

Evidence

Geography was essentially the material underpinning for knowledge about the Orient. All the latent and unchanging characteristics of the Orient stood upon, were rooted in, its geography. Thus on the one hand the geographical Orient nourished its inhabitants, guaranteed their characteristics, and defined their specificity; on the other hand, the geographical Orient solicited the West’s attention, even as—by one of those paradoxes revealed so frequently by organized knowledge—East was East and West was West. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 539 (#expands, via linked claim)

For another, a more knowledgeable attitude towards the alien and exotic was abetted not only by travelers and explorers but also by historians for whom European experience could profitably be compared with other, as well as older, civilizations. That powerful current in eighteenth-century historical anthropology, described by scholars as the confrontation of the gods, meant that Gibbon could read the lessons of Rome’s decline in the rise of Islam, just as Vico could understand modern civilization in terms of the barbaric, poetic splendor of their earliest beginnings. Whereas Renaissance historians judged the Orient inflexibly as an enemy, those of the eighteenth century confronted the Orient’s peculiarities with some detachment and with some attempt at dealing directly with Oriental source material, perhaps because such a technique helped a European to know himself better. George Sale’s translation of the Koran and his accompanying preliminary discourse illustrate the change. Unlike his predecessors, Sale tried to deal with Arab history in terms of Arab sources; moreover, he let Muslim commentators on the sacred text speak for themselves. In Sale, as throughout the eighteenth century, simple comparatism was the early phase of the comparative disciplines (philology, anatomy, jurisprudence, religion) which were to become the boast of nineteenth-century method. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 324 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Oriental’s status as a separate fixed subspecies emerged only in the nineteenth century — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 178; Nineteenth-century Orientalism claimed every Asiatic civilization as its object; Imperial geography roots fixed Oriental character in a physical territory — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 539 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Nineteenth-century Orientalism claimed every Asiatic civilization as its object #expands (0.90)
• Imperial geography roots fixed Oriental character in a physical territory #expands (0.85) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 539
• Eighteenth-century historical comparatism prepared the ground for nineteenth-century Orientalist method. #expands (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 324