The scientific and geopolitical projects both extend Napoleon’s Orientalist program

Evidence

Artistic or textual work was not the only product of the Napoleonic expedition. There were, in addition and certainly more influential, the scientific project, whose chief instance is Ernest Renan’s Système comparé et histoire générale des langues sémitiques, completed in 1848 for-neatly enough-the Prix Volney, and the geopolitical project, of which Ferdinand de Lesseps’s Suez Canal and England’s occupation of Egypt in 1882 are prime instances. The difference between the two is not only in manifest scale but also in quality of Orientalist conviction. Renan truly believed that he had re-created the Orient, as it really was, in his work. De Lesseps, on the other hand, always was somewhat awed by the newness his project had released out of the old Orient, and this sense communicated itself to everyone for whom the opening of the canal in 1869 was no ordinary event. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 237

Categorization

• XREF: Distinguishes textual/scientific vs. geopolitical Orientalism — a distinction that carries into later critiques of area studies and the ‘knowledge-power’ coupling in postcolonial theory.
• DEFINE: Names two non-artistic modes of the Orientalist project worth carrying forward as concepts.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 237