Western scholarly handling turned the Orient from alien into colonial space

Evidence

The centuries-old designation of geographical space to the east of Europe as “Oriental” was partly political, partly doctrinal, and partly imaginative; it implied no necessary connection between actual experience of the Orient and knowledge of what is Oriental, and certainly Dante and d’Herbelot made no claims about their Oriental ideas except that they were corroborated by a long learned (and not existential) tradition. But when Lane, Renan, Burton, and the many hundreds of nineteenth-century European travelers and scholars discuss the Orient, we can immediately note a far more intimate and even proprietary attitude towards the Orient and things Oriental. In the classical and often temporally remote form in which it was reconstructed by the Orientalist, in the precisely actual form in which the modern Orient was lived in, studied, or imagined, the geographical space of the Orient was penetrated, worked over, taken hold of. The cumulative effect of decades of so sovereign a Western handling turned the Orient from alien into colonial space. What was important in the latter nineteenth century was not whether the West had penetrated and possessed the Orient, but rather how the British and French felt that they had done it. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 522

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the classical textual tradition from the proprietary nineteenth-century Orientalist attitude - a key definitional distinction between the two registers.
• XREF: The ‘alien into colonial space’ transformation connects to the biopolitics/territory discussions in the reader’s scaffolding module.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 522