The Second World War transformed academic Orientalism in Britain
Evidence
Hitherto the study and teaching of Arabic and Islamic studies had depended on a handful of often grand, but rather eccentric figures. In the wake of the war, additional departments were established and enough scholars entered the field for proper scholarly discourse to take place. Historians replaced philologists as the authors of works on Islamic history. Anthropologists, sociologists and geographers also began to make a contribution. Moreover, there was growing emphasis on teaching the modern and spoken versions of Oriental languages. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 426
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to how wars typically professionalize and expand intelligence-adjacent academic fields, as with area studies in Cold War America.
Related
- American empire inherited and reformulated European Orientalism after World War II (similarity 0.83)
- American Middle East studies depended on recruited British and European Orientalists (similarity 0.82)
- Twentieth-century Orientalists shifted from writing for peers to writing for a lay public (similarity 0.81)
- Postwar hostility to Orientalism grew from political conflict, not scholarship defects (similarity 0.80)
- Postwar university expansion created new positions in previously neglected fields like Oriental studies (similarity 0.79)
- German Orientalists led the field despite Germany having no Arab empire. (similarity 0.79)
- Oriental studies were reframed as instruments of national postwar policy, not scholarship (similarity 0.79)
- Mandate partition of the Ottoman empire redirected archaeological access to French and British scholars (similarity 0.79)
- Centuries of Orientalist scholarship have functioned as domination and violence (similarity 0.78)
- Empire shifting to the US carried Orientalist scholars across the Atlantic with it (similarity 0.78)
- Orientalism metamorphosed from scholarly discourse into an imperial institution (similarity 0.78)