Three US foundations funded university area studies to consolidate global hegemony

Evidence

Three foundations played a significant role in this process: the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Center, and the Ford Foundation. International relations scholar Inderjeet Parmar suggests that these “Big 3” foundations helped mobilize knowledge production within universities to “consolidate U.S. hegemony around the globe.” With large grants, US universities set out to create departments, centers, and programs instrumental to serving the needs of empire. Two approaches guided the study of the Middle East: Orientalism (which was still dominated by philologists) and social scientific research, from which a new model known as “modernization” would be developed. This latter model, while it claimed to be objective social science, was in fact imbued with notions of “exceptionalism and empire,” as historian Osamah Khalil argues in his comprehensive book on knowledge production on the Middle East, America’s Dream Palace. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 240

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and to the broader literature on how Cold War think tanks and philanthropy shaped academic disciplines — see also Mills on the power elite and the military-academic complex. — connects to: American funders backed several new West German social-science institutes — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1861; Academic grants and visas are weapons to control historiography; Foundations and state built area studies to serve Cold War empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 240 (+2 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: how the ‘modernization theory’ of the Cold War persists in today’s think-tank policy discourse about the Middle East.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 240

Broader Connections

• Foundations and state built area studies to serve Cold War empire #corroborates (0.92) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 240
• Orientalism adapted to decolonization by rebranding itself as interdisciplinary area studies #expands (0.85)
• Academic grants and visas are weapons to control historiography #expands (0.82)