Volney read Eastern despotism through classical republican categories, not exoticism

Evidence

After the sonorous opening invocation, Volney presented himself as sitting amidst the ruins of Palmyra, musing on the grandeur of the place as it once was and on the causes of the passing of its greatness. All of a sudden, there appears beside him a spectral genius, or genie, who takes the author aloft and gives him an airborne lecture on the causes of the rise and fall of empires and lots of other things besides. The key question was why the East was so impoverished and backward compared with the West. The prevalence of despotism in the East was a large part of the answer. Volney, steeped in the classics, found it natural to compare the Mamluks and Pashas to the tyrants of Syracuse and other oppressive despots of classical antiquity. So there was nothing inherently exotic, or Other, about despotism. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 243

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses Said’s framing by showing Orientalist texts that denied Eastern Otherness through classical comparison.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that despotism was seen as universal rather than Oriental cuts against the entire Said thesis and reframes how ‘Oriental despotism’ functioned in Enlightenment thought.

Related

• The concept of Oriental despotism was devised to justify European empire (similarity 0.79)