The word Orientalist changed meaning repeatedly over two centuries

Evidence

In the eighteenth century the French word ‘Orientaliste’ described someone who was preoccupied with Levantine matters (not Chinese or Indian). In Britain, ‘Orientalist’, as used in the late eighteenth century, referred at first to a style rather than to a scholarly discipline. ‘Dragons are a sure mark of orientalism’ according to Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81). Only in the early nineteenth century did it come to refer to the study of any and all Asian languages and cultures. There was a period in the 1830s when ‘Orientalist’ acquired a quite specific meaning in the context of British India. The ‘Orientalists’ there were administrators and scholars who advocated working with the traditional Muslim and Hindu institutions and customs as much as possible and of studying, teaching and researching the Indian cultural legacy. Such men were opposed and ultimately defeated by Anglicists like Macaulay and Bentinck, who, broadly speaking, preferred to impose British institutions and culture on the subcontinent. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 21

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the term ‘Orientalist’ had at least four distinct historical meanings before Said’s contested redefinition.
• XREF: The 1830s Orientalist-vs-Anglicist contest maps onto the reader’s South Asian interests and Modi/Hindutva-era Anglophone debates.

Related

• The term ‘Orientalist’ initially meant a proponent of local rule in India (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholars were a diverse group spanning nations, religions, and politics (similarity 0.81)
• Oriental tales circulated widely in English literature across two centuries (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism operates as both an academic discipline and a repository of cultural images (similarity 0.79)
• Said defines Orientalism as a Western instrument for dominating the Orient (similarity 0.79)
• Said defined Orientalism as scholarship tied to governing the Middle East (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism expanded from scholarly practice to signify imperialist ideology (similarity 0.79)
• Orient originally designated the Middle East and Islamic world, not Asia (similarity 0.79)
• Modern Orientalism expanded representational range after the late eighteenth century (similarity 0.79)
• Before the eighteenth century Asian scholars were called Orientalists, not Semiticists (similarity 0.79)
• Major Orientalist scholarship was published in Latin into the twentieth century. (similarity 0.79)
• Dismissing Orientalism as bad faith ignores its material scholarly functions. (similarity 0.79)
• Postwar postcolonial critiques transformed Orientalism’s meaning from scholarship into ideology of empire (similarity 0.78)
• Orientalism is studied via its internal consistency, not its correspondence to a real Orient (similarity 0.78)
• Nineteenth-century Orientalism framed language study as the evolutionary development of the human mind. (similarity 0.78)