No More Learning

Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orientdealing
with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it
settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating restructuring, and
having authority over the Orient. I have found it useful here to employ is a Foucault’s notion of a
discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish,
to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one
cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was
able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically , sociologically, militarily, ideologically,
scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative
a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient
could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by
Orientalism. In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of
thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said
about the Orient, but that it is the-whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and
therefore always involved) any occasion when that peculiar entity “the Orient” is in question.
How this happens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that European
culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate
an even underground self. ,
Historically and culturally there is a quantitative as well as a qualitative difference between
the Franco-British involvement in the Orient and-until the period of American ascendancy after
12
World War II-the involvement of every other European and Atlantic power. To speak of
Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French
cultural enterprise a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination
itself, the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands, the spice trade,
colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus,
innumerable Oriental “experts” and “hands,” an Oriental professorate, a complex array of
“Oriental” ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelt , sensuality), many Eastern sects,
philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use-the list can be extended more or
less indefinitely. My point is that Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced
between Britain and France and the Orient, which until the early nineteenth century had really
meant only India and the Bible lands. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end
of World War II France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War II
America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did. Out of that
closeness whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the
comparatively greater strength of the Occident (British, French, or American), comes the large
body of texts I call Orientalist.
It should be said at once that even with the generous number of books and authors that I
examine, there is a much larger number that I simply have had to leave out. My argument,
however, depends neither upon an exhaustive catalogue of texts dealing with the Orient nor upon
a clearly delimited set of texts, authors, and ideas that together make up the Orientalist canon. I
have depended instead upon a different methodological alternative-whose backbone in a sense is
the set of historical generalizations I have so far been making in this Introduction-and it is these I
want now to discuss in more analytical detail.
II
I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely
there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either: We must take seriously Vico’s great
observation
13
that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it
to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities-to say nothing of historical entities -such
locales, regions geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are man-made. Therefore as
much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought,
imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two
geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.
Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first
place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no
corresponding reality. When Disraeli said in his novel Tancred that the East was a career, he
meant that to be interested in the East was something bright young Westerners would find to be
an all consuming passion; he should not be interpreted as saying that the East was only a career
for Westerners. There were-and are- cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their
lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be
said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute,
except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals
principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal
consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond
any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a “real” Orient. My point is that Disraeli’s statement
about the East refers mainly to that created consistency, that regular constellation of ideas as the
pre-eminent thing about the Orient, and not to its mere being, as Wallace Stevens’s phrase has it.
A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or
studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied. To
believe that the Orient was created-or, as I call it, “Orientalized” -and to believe that such things
happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between
Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a compex
hegemony an is quite accurately indicated in the title of K. M. Panikkar’s classic Asia and
Western Dominance. ’ The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be
“Oriental” in all those ways considered common-
14
place by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be-that is, submitted
to being-made Oriental. There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that
Flau- bert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely in fluential model of the
Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or
history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and
these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem
physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was “typically Oriental. ” My
argument is that Flaubert’s situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated
instance. It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the
discourse about the Orient that it enabled.
This brings us to a third qualification. One ought never to assume that the structure of
Orientalism is nothing more an a structure of lies or of myths which were the truth about them to
be told, would simply blow away. I myself believe that Orientalism is more particularly valuable
as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient then it is as a veridic discourse about the
Orient (which is what, in its academic or scholarly form, it claims to be). Never theless, what we
must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted together strength of Orientalist discourse, its
very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and its redoubt- able
durability. After all, any system of ideas that can remain unchanged as teachable wisdom (in
academies, books, congresses, universities, foreign-service institutes) from the period of Ernest
Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States must be something more formidable
than a mere collection of. lies. Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the
Orient but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many rations, there has been a
considerable material investment. Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of
knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western
consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied-indeed, made truly productive-the
statements proliferating out from Orientalism into the general culture.
Gramsci has made the useful analytic distinction between civil and political society in which
the former is made up of voluntary (or atleast rational and noncoercive) affiliations like schools,
15
families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army, the police, the central bureaucracy)
whose role in the polity is direct domination. Culture, of course, is to be found operating within
civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through
domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In any society not totalitarian, then, certain
cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more in- fluential than others; the
form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensable
concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West. It is hegemony, or rather the
result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism the durability and the strength I have
been speaking about so far. Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of
Europe,3 a collective notion identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans, and
indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that
culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identiy as a superior one in
comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of
European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Orental
backwardness usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical,
thinker might have had different views on the matter.
In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional
superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient
without ever losing him the relative upper hand. And why should it have been otherwise,
especially during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to
the present? The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought
about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on
the Orient’s part. Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella
of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century,
there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for
reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological,
linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic
and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality,
16
national or religious character. Additionally, the imaginative examination of things Oriental was
based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose
unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or
what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality
but by a battery of desires, regressions, investments, and projections. If we can point to great
Orientalist works of genuine scholarship like Silvestre de Sacy’s Chrestomathie arabe or Edward
William Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, we need also to
note that Renan’s and Gobineau’s racial ideas came out of the same impulse, as did a great many
Victorian pornographic novels (see the analysis by Steven Marcus of “The Lustful Turk”4
`).
And yet, one must repeatedly ask oneself whether what matters in Orientalism is the general
group of ideas overriding the mass of material-about which who could deny that they were shot
through with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds of racism, imperialism, and the
like, dogmatic views of “the Oriental” as a kind of ideal and unchanging abstraction? —or the
much more varied work produced by almost uncountable individual writers, whom one would
take up as individual instances of authors dealing with the Orient. In a sense the two alternatives,
general and particular, are really two perspectives on the same material: in both instances one
would have to deal with pioneers in the field like William Jones, with great artists like Nerval or
Flaubert. And why would it not be possible to employ both perspectives together, or one after the
other? Isn’t there an obvious danger of distortion (of precisely the kind that academic Orientalism
has always been prone to) if either too general or too specific a level of description is maintained
systematically?
My two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too
dogmatic a generality and too positivistic a localized focus. In trying to deal with these problems
I have tried to deal with three main aspects of my own contemporary reality that seem to me to
point the way out of the methodological or perspectival difficulties I have been discussing,
difficulties that might force one, in the first instance, into writing a coarse polemic on so
unacceptably general a level of description as not to be worth the effort, or in the second instance,
into writing so detailed and atomistic a series of analyses as to lose all track of the general
17
lines of force informing the field, giving it its special cogency. How then to recognize
individuality and to reconcile it with its intelligent, and by no means passive or merely dictatorial,
general and hegemonic context?
III
I mentioned three aspects of my contemporary reality: I must explain and briefly discuss
them now, so that it can be seen how I was led to a particular course of research and writing.
1. The distinction between pure and political knowledge. It is very easy to argue that
knowledge about Shakespeare or Wordsworth is not political whereas knowledge about
contemporary China or the Soviet Union is. My own formal and professional designation is that
of “humanist,” a title which indicates the humanities as my field and therefore the unlikely
eventuality that there might be anything political about what I do in that field. Of course, all these
labels and terms are quite unnuanced as I use them here, but the general truth of what I am
pointing to is, I think, widely held. One reason for saying that a humanist who writes about
Wordsworth, or an editor whose specialty is Keats, is not involved in anything political is that
what he does seems to have no direct political effect upon reality in the everyday sense. A scholar
whose field is Soviet economics works in a highly charged area where there is much government
interest, and what he might produce in the way of studies or proposals will be taken up by
policymakers, government officials, institutional economists, intelligence experts. The distinction
between “humanists” and persons whose work has policy implications, or political significance,
can be broadened further by saying that the former’s ideological color is a matter of incidental
importance to politics (although possibly of great moment to his colleagues in the field, who may
object to his Stalinism or fascism or too easy liberalism), whereas the ideology of the latter is
woven directly into his material-indeed, economics, politics, and sociology in the modern -
academy are ideological sciences-and- therefore taken for granted as being “political. ” .
Nevertheless the determining impingement on most knowledge
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produced in the contemporary West (and here I speak mainly about the United States) is that it be
nonpolitical, that is, scholarly, academic, impartial, above partisan or small-minded doctrinal
belief. One can have no quarrel with such an ambition in theory, perhaps, but in practice the
reality is much more problematic. No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar
from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a
class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society.
These continue to bear on what he does professionally, even though naturally enough his research
and its fruits do attempt to reach a level of relative freedom from the inhibitions and the
restrictions of brute, everyday reality. For there is such a thing as knowledge that is less, rather
than more, partial than the individual (with his entangling and distracting life circumstances) who
produces it. Yet this knowledge is not therefore automatically nonpolitical.
Whether discussions of literature or of classical philology are fraught with—or have
unmediated-political significance is a very large question that I have tried to treat in some detail
elsewhere. ’ What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus
that “true” knowledge is fundamentally non political (and conversely, that overtly political
knowledge is not “true” knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political
circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced. No one is helped in understanding this
today when are adjective “political” is used as a label to discredit any work for daring to violate
the protocol of pretended suprapolitical objectivity. We may say, first, that civil society
recognizes a gradation of political importance in the various fields of knowledge. To some extent
the political importance given a field comes from the possibility of its direct translation into
economic terms; but to a greater extent political importance comes from the closeness of a field to
ascertainable sources of power in political society. Thus an economic study of long-term Soviet
energy potential and its effect on military capability is likely to be commissioned by the Defense
Department, and thereafter to acquire a kind of political status impossible for a study of Tolstoi’s
early fiction financed in part by a foundation. Yet both works belong in what civil society
acknowledges to be a similar field, Russian studies, even though one work may be done by a very
conservative economist, the other by a radical literary
19
historian. My point here is that “Russia” as a general subject matter has political priority over
nicer distinctions such as “economics” and “literary history,” because political society in
Gramsci’s sense reaches into such realms of civil society as the academy and saturates them with
significance of direct concern to it.
I do not want to press all this any further on general theoretical grounds: it seems to me that
the value and credibility of my case can be demonstrated by being much more specific, in the
way, for example, Noam Chomsky has studied the instrumental connection between the Vietnam
War and the notion of objective scholarship as it was applied To cover state-sponsored military
research. Now because Britain, France, and- recently the United States are imperial powers, their
political societies impart to their civil societies a sense of urgency, a direct political infusion as it
were, where and whenever matters pertaining to their imperial interests abroad are concerned. I
doubt that it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later
nineteenth century took an interest in those countries that was never far from their status in his
mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic
knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross
political fact-and that is what 1 am saying in this study of Orientalism. For if it is true that no
production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s
involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances, then it must also be true that for a
European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the maid circumstances of
his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an
individual second. And to be a European or an American in such a situation is by no means an
inert fact. It meant and means being aware, however dimly, that one belongs to a power with
definite interests in the Orient, and more important, that one belongs to a part of the earth with a
definite history of involvement in the Orient almost since the time of Homer.
Put in this way, these political actualities are still too undefined ltd general to be really
interesting. Anyone would agree to them without necessarily agreeing also that they mattered
very much, for instance, to Flaubert as he wrote Salammbó, or to H. A. R. Gibb as he wrote
Modern Trends in Islam. The trouble is that there is too great a distance between the big
dominating fact, as I have described it,
20
and the details of everyday life that govern the minute discipline of a novel or a scholarly text as
each is being written. Yet if we eliminate from the start any notion that “big” facts like imperial
domination can be applied mechanically and deterministically to such complex matters as culture
and ideas, then we will begin to approach an interesting kind of study. My idea is that European
and then American interest in the Orient was political according to some of the obvious historical
accounts of it that I have given here, but that it was the culture that created that interest, that acted
dynamically along with brute political, economic, and military rationales to make the Orient the
varied and complicated place that it obviously was in the field I call Orientalism.
Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively
by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the
Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to
hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic,
scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only
of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and
Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery,
philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not
only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to
understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly
different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in
direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and
exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange
with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with
reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences),
power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas
about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real
argument is that Orientalism is-and does not simply represent-a considerable dimension of
modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with
“our” world.
21
Because Orientalism is a cultural and a political fact, then, it does not exist in some archival
vacuum; quite the contrary, I think it can be shown that what is thought, said, or even done about
the Orient follows (perhaps occurs within) certain distinct and intellectually knowable lines. Here
too a considerable degree of nuance and elaboration can be seen working as between the broad
superstructural pressures and the details of composition, the facts of textuality. Most humanistic
scholars are, I think, perfectly happy with the notion that texts exist in contexts, that there is such
a thing as intertextuality, that the pressures of conventions, predecessors, and rhetorical styles
limit what Walter Benjamin once called the “overtaxing of the productive person in the name of .
. . the principle of `creativity,’ “in which the poet is believed on his own, and out of his pure
mind, to have brought forth his work. ’ Yet there is a reluctance to allow that political,
institutional, and ideological constraints act in the same manner on the individual author. A
humanist will believe it to be an interesting fact to any interpreter of Balzac that he was
influenced in the Comédie humaine by the conflict between Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier,
but the same sort of pressure on Balzac of deeply reactionary monarchism is felt in some vague
way to demean his literary “genius” and therefore to be less worth serious study. Similarly-as
Harry Bracken has been tirelessly showing-philosophers will conduct their discussions of Locke,
Hume, and empiricism without ever taking into account that there is an explicit connection in
these classic writers between their “philosophic” doctrines racial theory, justifications of slavery,
or arguments for colonial exploitation. 8
These are common enough ways by which contemporary
scholarship keeps itself pure.
Perhaps it is true that most attempts to rub culture’s nose in the mud of politics have been
crudely iconoclastic; per perhaps also the social interpretation of literature in my own field has
simply riot kept up with the enormous technical advances in detailed textual analysis. But there is
no getting away from the fact that Weary studies in general, and American Marxist theorists in
particular, have avoided the effort of seriously bridging the gap between the superstructural and
the base levels in textual, historical scholarship; on another occasion I have gone so far as to say
that the literary-cultural establishment as a whole has declare the serious study of imperialism and
culture off limits. 9 For Orientalism brings one up directly against that question-that is, to realizing
22
that political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination, and scholarly institutionsin
such a way as to make its avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility. Yet there will
always remain the perennial escape mechanism of saying that a literary scholar and a philosopher,
for example, are trained in literature and philosophy respectively, not in politics or ideological
analysis. In other words, the specialist argument can work quite effectively to block the larger
and, in my opinion, the more intellectually serious perspective.
Here it seems to me there is a simple two-part answer to be given, at least so far as the study
of imperialism and culture (or Orientalism) is concerned. In the first place, nearly every
nineteenth-century writer (and the same is true enough of writers in earlier periods) was
extraordinarily well aware of the fact of empire: this is a subject not very well studied, but it will
not take a modern Victorian specialist long to admit that liberal cultural heroes like John Stuart
Mill, Arnold, Carlyle, Newman, Macaulay, Ruskin, George Eliot, and even Dickens had definite
views on race and imperialism, which are quite easily to be found at work in their writing. So even
a specialist must deal with the knowledge that Mill, for example, made it clear in On Libert and
Representative Government that his views there could not be applied to India (he was an India
Office functionary for a good deal of his life; after all) because the Indians were civilizationally,
if not racially, inferior. The same kind of paradox is to be found in Marx, as I try to show in this
book. In the second place, to believe that politics in the form of imperialism bears upon the
production of literature, scholarship, social theory, and history writing is by no means equivalent
to saying that culture is therefore a demeaned or denigrated thing. Quite the contrary: my whole
point is to say that we can better understand the persistence and the durability of saturating
hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their internal constraints upon writers and
thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting. It is this idea that Gramsci, certainly, and
Foucault and Raymond Williams in their very different ways have been trying to illustrate. Even
one or two pages by Williams on “the uses of the Empire” in The Long Revolution tell us more
about nineteenth-century cultural richness than many volumes of hermetic textual analyses. 10
Therefore I study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between
23
individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires - British
French, American-in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced. What
interests me most as a scholar is not the gross political verity but the detail, as indeed what
interests us in someone like Lane or Flaubert or Renan is not the (to him) indisputable truth that
Occidentals are superior to Orientals, but the profoundly worked over and modulated evidence of
his detailed work within the very wide space opened up by that truth. One need only remember
that Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is a classic of historical and
anthropological observation because of its style, its enormously intelligent and brilliant details,
not because of its simple reflection of racial superiority, to understand what I am saying here.
The kind of political questions raised by Orientalism, then, are as follows: What other sorts of
intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly, and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist
tradition like the Orientalist one? How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and
economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism’s broadly
imperialist view of the world? What changes, modulations, refinements, even revolutions take
place within Orientalism? What is the meaning of originality, of continuity, of individuality, in
this context? How does Orientalism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to another? In
fine, how can we treat the cultural, historical phenomenon of Orientalism as a kind of willed
human work-not of mere ,unconditioned ratiocination-in all its historical complexity, detail, and
worth without at the same time losing sight of the alliance between cultural work, political
tendencies, the state, and the specific realities of domination? Governed by such concerns a
humanistic study can responsibly address itself to politics and culture. But this is not to say that
such a study establishes a hard-and-fast rule about the relationship between knowledge and
politics. My argument is that each humanistic investigation must formulate the nature of that
connection in the specific context of the study, the subject utter, and its historical circumstances.
2. The methodological question. In a previous book I gave a deal of thought and analysis to
the methodological importance for work in the human sciences of finding and formulating a first
a point of departure, a beginning principle. 11 A major lesson
24
I learned and tried to present was that there is no such thing as a merely given,or simply available,
starting point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what
follows from them. Nowhere in my experience has the difficulty of this lesson been more
consciously lived (with what success-or failure -I cannot really say) than in this study of
Orientalism. The idea of beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of
delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material, separated from the mass,
and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning; for the student of texts one such
notion of inaugural delimitation is Louis Althusser’s idea of the problematic, a specific
determinate unity of a text, or group of texts, which is something given rise to by analysis. 12 Yet
in the case of Orientalism (as opposed to the case of Marx’s texts, which is what Althusser
studies) there is not simply the problem of finding a point of departure, or problematic, but also
the question of designating which texts, authors, and periods are the ones best suited for study.
It has seemed to me foolish to attempt an encyclopedic narrative history of Orientalism, first
of all because if my guiding principle was to be “the’ European idea of the Orient” there would be
virtually no limit to the material I would have had to deal with; second, because the narrative
model itself did not suit my descriptive and political interests; third, because in such books as
Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance orientale, Johann Fűck’s Die Arabischen Studien in Europa
bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts, and more recently, Dorothee Metlitzki’s The Matter of
Araby in Medieval England13 there already exist encyclopedic works on certain aspects of the
European-Oriental encounter such as make the critic’s job, in the general political and intellectual
context . I sketched above, a different one.
There still remained the problem of cutting down a very fat archive to manageable
dimensions, and more important, outlining something in the nature of an intellectual order within
that group of texts without at the same time following a mindlessly chronological order. My
starting point therefore has been the British, French, and American experience of the Orient taken
as a unit, what made that experience possible by way of historical and intellectual background,
what the quality and character of the experience has been. For reasons I shall discuss presently I
limited that already limited (but still inordinately large) set of questions to
25
the Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam, which for almost a thousand
years together stood for the Orient. Immediately upon doing that, a large part of the Orient seemed
to have been eliminated-India, Japan, China, and other sections of the Far East-not because these
regions were not important (they obviously have been) but because one could discuss Europe’s
experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam, apart from its experience of the Far Orient. Yet at
certain moments of that general European history of interest in the East, particular parts of the
Orient like Egypt, Syria, and Arabia cannot be discussed without also studying Europe’s
involvement in the more distant parts, of which Persia and India are the most important; a notable
case in point is the connection between Egypt and India so far as eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury
Britain was concerned. Similarly the French role in deciphering the Zend-Avesta, the preeminence
of Paris as a center of Sanskrit studies during the first decade of the nineteenth century,
the fact that Napoleon’s interest in the went was contingent upon his sense of the British role in
India: these Far Eastern interests directly influenced French interest it the Near East, Islam, and
the Arabs.
Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from out the end of the seventeenth
century on. Yet my discussion of that domination and systematic interest does not do justice to (a)
important contributions to Orientalism of Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal and (b) the fact that
one of the important impulses toward the study of the Orient in the eighteenth was the revolution
in Biblical studies stimulated by such variously interesting pioneers as Bishop Lowth, Eichhorn,
Herder, and Michaelis. In the first place, I had to focus rigorously upon the British-French and
later the American material because it seemed inescapably true not only that Britain and France
were their nations in the Orient and in Oriental studies, but that these and positions were held by
virtue of the two greatest colonial networks in pre-twentieth-century history; the American
Orientaltion since World War II has fit-I think, quite self-consciously_in the places excavated by
the two earlier European powers. Alen too, I believe that the sheer quality, consistency, and mass
of British, French, and American writing on the Orient lifts it the doubtless crucial work done in
Germany, Italy, Russia, elsewhere. But I think it is also true that the major steps in Oriental
scholarship were first taken in either Britain and France,
26
then elaborated upon by Germans. Silvestre de Sacy, for example, was not only the first modern
and institutional European Orientalist, who worked on Islam, Arabic literature, the Druze
religion, and Sassanid Persia; he was also the teacher of Champollion and of Franz Bopp, the
founder of German comparative linguistics. A similar claim of priority and subsequent
preeminence can be made for William Jones and Edward William Lane.
In the second place-and here the failings of my study of Orientalism are amply made up forthere
has been some important recent work on the background in Biblical scholarship to the rise
of what I have called modern Orientalism. The best and the most illuminatingly relevant is E. S.
Shaffer’s impressive “Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem,” an indispensable study of the
origins of Romanticism, and of the intellectual activity underpinning a great deal of what goes on
in Coleridge, Browning, and George Eliot. To some degree Shaffer’s work refines upon the
outlines provided in Schwab, by articulating the material of relevance to be found in the German
Biblical scholars and using that material to read, in an intelligent and always interesting way, the
work of three major British writers. Yet what is missing in the book is some sense of the political
as well as ideological edge given the Oriental material by the British and French writers I am
principally concerned with; in addition, unlike Shaffer I attempt to elucidate subsequent
developments in academic as well as literary Orientalism that bear on the connection between
British and French Orientalism on the one hand and the rise of an explicitly colonial-minded
imperialism on the other. Then too, I wish to show how all these earlier matters are reproduced
more or less in American Orientalism after the Second World War.
Nevertheless there is a possibly misleading aspect to my study, where, aside from an
occasional reference, I do not exhaustively discuss the German developments after the inaugural
period dominated by Sacy. Any work that seeks to provide an understanding of academic
Orientalism and pays little attention to scholars like Steinthal, Mdller, Becker, Goldziher,
Brockelmann, Noldeke-to mention only a handful-needs to be reproached, and I freely reproach
myself. I particularly regret not taking more account of the great scientific prestige that accrued to
German scholarship by the middle of the nineteenth century, whose neglect was made into a
denunciation of insular British scholars by George Eliot. I have in mind Eliot’s unforgettable
portrait of Mr. Casaubon in Middle-march.
27
One reason Casaubon cannot finish his Key to All Mythologies is, according to his young cousin
Will Ladislaw, that he is unacquainted with German scholarship. For not only has Casaubon
chosen a subject “as changing as chemistry: new discoveries are constantly making new points of
view”: he is undertaking a job similar to a refutation of Paracelsus because “he is not an
Orientalist, you know. ”15
Eliot was not wrong in implying that by about 1830, which is when Middlemarch is set,
German scholarship had fully attained its European preeminence. Yet at no time in German
scholarship during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century could a close partnership have
developed between Orientalists and a protracted, sustained national interest in the Orient. There
was nothing in Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North
Africa. Moreover, the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical,
Orient: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual, the
way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateaubriand, Lane, Lamartine, Burton, Disraeli, or
Nerval. There is some significance in the fact that the two most renowned German works on the
Orient, Goethe’s Westöstlicher Diwan and Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache and Weisheit
der Indier, were based respectively on a Rhine journey and on hours spent in Paris libraries. What
German Oriental scholarship did was to refine and elaborate techniques whose application was to
texts, myths, ideas, and languages almost literally gathered from the Orient by imperial Britain
and France.
Yet what German Orientalism had in common with Anglo French and later American
Orientalism was a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture. This
authority must in large part be the subject of any description of Orientalism, and it is so in this
study. Even the name Orientalism suggests a serious, perhaps ponderous style of expertise; when
I apply it to modern American social scientists (since they do not call themselves Orientalists, my
use of the word is anomalous), it is to draw attention to the way Middle East experts can still
draw on the vestiges of Orientalism’s intellectual position in nineteenth-century Europe.
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated;
it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is
virtually
28
indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and
judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed. All
these attributes of authority apply to Orientalism, and much of what I do in this study is to
describe both the historical authority in and the personal authorities of Orientalism.
My principal methodological devices for studying authority here are what can be called
strategic location, which is a way of describing the author’s position in a text with regard to the
Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of analyzing the
relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual
genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the
culture at large. I use the notion of strategy simply to identify the problem every writer on the
Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or
overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its awful dimensions. Everyone who writes about the
Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the
kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes,
motifs that circulate in his text all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader,
containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf. None of this takes
place in the abstract, however. Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer)
assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and
on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with
audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of relationships between works,
audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient therefore constitutes an analyzable
formation-for example, that of philological studies, of anthologies of extracts from Oriental
literature, of travel books, of Oriental fantasies-whose presence in time, in discourse, in
institutions (schools, libraries, foreign services) gives it strength and authority.
It is clear, I hope, that my concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden
in the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it describes. I
do not think that this idea can be overemphasized. Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that
is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes
29
the Orient renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient
except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that
it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an
existential and as a moral fact. The principal product of this exteriority is of course,
representation: as early as Aeschylus’s play The Persians the Orient is transformed from a very
far distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that are relatively familiar (in Aeschylus’s
case, grieving Asiatic women). The dramatic immediacy of representation in The Persians
obscures the fact that the audience is watching a highly artificial enactment of what a nonOriental
has made into a symbol for the whole Orient. My analysis of the Orientalist text
therefore places emphasis on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such
representations as representations, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient. This evidence is
found just as prominently in the so-called truthful text (histories, philological analyses, political
treatises) as in the avowedly artistic (i. e. , openly imaginative) text. The things to look at are style,
figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the
correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original. The exteriorly of the
representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent
itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux,
for the poor Orient. “Sie können sich nicht vertreten,sie műssen vertre en werden,” as Marx wrote
in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Another reason for insisting upon exteriority is that I believe it needs to be made clear about
cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not
“truth” but representations. It hardly needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a
highly organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express, indicate,
exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth. In any instance of at least written
language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation.
The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient therefore
relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such. On the contrary, the
written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced made
supererogatory any such real thing as “the Orient. ” Thus all
30
of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient: that Orientalism makes sense at all depends
more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western
techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, “there” in discourse about it. And
these representations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of
understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient.
The difference between representations of the Orient before the last third of the eighteenth
century and those after it (that is, those belonging to what I call modern Orientalism) is that the
range of representation expanded enormously in the later period. It is true that after William Jones
and Anquetil-Duperron, and after Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, Europe came to know the
Orient more scientifically, to live in it with greater authority and discipline than ever before. But
what mattered to Europe was the expanded scope and the much greater refinement given its
techniques for receiving the Orient. When around the turn of the eighteenth century the Orient
definitively revealed the age of its languages-thus outdating Hebrew’s divine pedigree-it was a
group of Europeans who made the discovery, passed it on to other scholars, and preserved the
discovery in the new science of Indo-European philology. A new powerful science for viewing
the linguistic Orient was born, and with it, as Foucault has shown in The Order of Things, a
whole web of related scientific interests. Similarly William Beckford, Byron, Goethe, and Hugo
restructured the Orient by their art and made its colors, lights, and people visible through their
images, rhythms, and motifs. At most, the “real” Orient provoked a writer to his vision; it very
rarely guided it.
Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which
was also produced by the West. Thus the history of Orientalism has both an internal consistency
and a highly articulated set of relationships to the dominant culture surrounding it. My analyses
consequently try to show the field’s shape and internal organization, its pioneers, patriarchal
authorities, canonical texts, doxological ideas, exemplary figures, its followers, elaborators, and
new authorities; I try also to explain how Orientalism borrowed and was frequently informed by
“strong” ideas, doctrines, and trends ruling the culture. Thus there was (and is) a linguistic Orient,
a Freudian Orient, a Spenglerian Orient, a Darwinian Orient, a racist Orient-and so on. Yet never
has there
31
been such a thing as a pure, or unconditional, Orient; similarly, never has there been a
nonmaterial form of Orientalism, much less something so innocent as an “idea” of the Orient. In
this underlying conviction and in its ensuing methodological consequences do I differ from
scholars who study the history of ideas. For the emphases and the executive form, above all the
material effectiveness, of statements made by Orientalist discourse are possible in ways that any
hermetic history of ideas tends completely to scant. Without those emphases and that material
effectiveness Orientalism would be just another idea, whereas it is and was much more than that.
Therefore I set out to examine not only scholarly works but also works of literature, political
tracts, journalistic texts, travel books, religious and philological studies. In other words, my hybrid
perspective is broadly historical and “anthropological,” given that I believe all texts to be worldly
and circumstantial in (of course) ways that vary from genre to genre, and from historical period to
historical period.
Yet unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted, I do believe in the
determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts
constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism. The unity of the large ensemble of texts I
analyze is due in part to the fact that they frequently refer to each other: Orientalism is after all a
system for citing works and authors. Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the
Modern Egyptians was read and cited by such diverse figures as Nerval, Flaubert, and Richard
Burton. He was an authority whose use was an imperative for anyone writing or thinking about
the Orient, not just about Egypt: when Nerval borrows passages verbatim from Modern Egyptians
it is to use Lane’s authority to assist him in describing village scenes in Syria, not Egypt. Lane’s
authority and the opportunities provided for citing him discriminately as well as indiscriminately
were there because Orientalism could give his text the kind of distributive currency that he
acquired. There is no way, however, of understanding Lane’s currency without also
understanding the peculiar features of his text; this is equally true of Renan, Sacy, Lamartine,
Schlegel, and a group of other influential writers. Foucault believes that in general the individual
text or author counts for very little; empirically, in the case of Orientalism (and perhaps nowhere
else) I find this not to be so. Accordingly my analyses employ close textual
32
readings whose goal is to reveal the dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex
collective formation to which his work is a contribution.
Yet even though it includes an ample selection of writers, this book is still far from a
complete history or general account of Orientalism. Of this failing I am very conscious. The
fabric of as thick a discourse as Orientalism has survived and functioned in Western society
because of its richness: all I have done is to describe parts of that fabric at certain moments, and
merely to suggest the existence of a larger whole, detailed, interesting, dotted with fascinating
figures, texts, and events. I have consoled myself with believing that this book is one installment
of several, and hope there are scholars and critics who might want to write others. There is still a
general essay to be written on imperialism and culture; other studies would go more deeply into
the connection between Orientalism and pedagogy, or into Italian, Dutch, German, and Swiss
Orientalism, or into the dynamic between scholarship and imaginative writing, or into the
relationship between administrative ideas and intellectual discipline. Perhaps the most important
task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how
one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and
nonmanipulative, perspective. But then one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of
knowledge and power. These are all tasks left embarrassingly incomplete in this study.
The last, perhaps self-flattering, observation on method that I want to make here is that I have
written this study with several audiences in mind. For students of literature and criticism,
Orientalism offers a marvelous instance of the interrelations between society, history, and
textuality; moreover, the cultural role played by the Orient in the West connects Orientalism with
ideology, politics, and the logic of power, matters of relevance, I think, to the literary community.
For contemporary students of the Orient, from university scholars to policymakers, I have written
with two ends in mind: one, to present their intellectual genealogy to them in a way that has not
been done; two, to criticize-with the hope of stirring discussion-the often unquestioned
assumptions on which their work for the most part depends. For the general reader, this study
deals with matters that always compel attention, all of them connected not only with Western
conceptions and treatments of the other but also with the singularly important role played by
Western culture
33
in what Vico called the world of nations. Lastly, for readers in the so-called Third World, this
study proposes itself as a step towards an understanding not so much of Western politics and of
the non-Western world in those politics as of the strength of Western cultural discourse, a
strength too often mistaken as merely decorative or “superstructural. ” My hope is to illustrate the
formidable structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the
dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or upon others.
The three long chapters and twelve shorter units into which this book is divided are intended
to facilitate exposition as much as possible. Chapter One, “The Scope of Orientalism,” draws a
large circle around all the dimensions of the subject, both in terms of historical time and
experiences and in terms of philosophical and political themes. Chapter Two, “Orientalist
Structures and Restructures,” attempts to trace the development of modern Orientalism by a
broadly chronological description, and also by the description of a set of devices common to the
work of important poets, artists, and scholars. Chapter Three, “Orientalism Now,” begins where
its predecessor left off, at around 1870. This is the period of great colonial expansion into the
Orient, and it culminates in World War II. The very last section of Chapter Three characterizes
the shift from British and French to American hegemony; I attempt there finally to sketch the
present intellectual and social realities of Orientalism in the United States.
3. The personal dimension. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: “The starting-point of
critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is `knowing thyself’ as a
product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without
leaving an inventory. ” The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci’s
comment at that, whereas is fact Gramsci’s Italian text concludes by adding, “therefore it is
imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory. ”16
Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an
“Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies
(Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early
awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of 0rientalism has been an attempt to inventory
the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a
factor in the life of all Orientals. This is why for me the
34
Islamic Orient has had to be the center of attention. Whether what I have achieved is the
inventory prescribed by Gramsci is not for me to judge, although I have felt it important to be
conscious of trying to produce one. Along the way, as severely and as rationally as I have been
able, I have tried to maintain a critical consciousness, as well as employing those instruments of
historical, humanistic, and cultural research of which my education has made me the fortunate
beneficiary. In none of that, however, have I ever lost hold of the cultural reality of, the personal
involvement in having been constituted as, “an Oriental. ”
The historical circumstances making such a study possible are fairly complex, and I can only
list them schematically here. Anyone resident in the West since the 1950s, particularly in the
United States, will have lived through an era of extraordinary turbulence in the relations of East
and West. No one will have failed to note how “East” has always signified danger and threat
during this period, even as it has meant the traditional Orient as well as Russia. In the universities
a growing establishment of area-studies programs and institutes has made the scholarly study of
the Orient a branch of national policy. Public affairs in this country include a healthy interest in
the Orient, as much for its strategic and economic importance as for its traditional exoticism. If
the world has become immediately accessible to a Western citizen living in the electronic age, the
Orient too has drawn nearer to him, and is now less a myth perhaps than a place crisscrossed by
Western, especially American, interests.
One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the
stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed. Television, the films, and all the media’s resources
have forced information into more and more standardized molds. So far as the Orient is
concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified the hold of the nineteenthcentury
academic and imaginative demonology of “the mysterious Orient. ” This is nowhere more
true than in the ways by which the Near East is grasped. Three things have contributed to making
even the simplest perception of the Arabs and Islam into a highly politicized, almost raucous
matter: one, the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, which is
immediately reflected in the history of Orientalism; two, the struggle between the Arabs and
Israeli Zionism, and its effects upon American Jews as well as upon both the liberal culture and
the population at large; three, the almost
35
total absence of any cultural position making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately
to discuss the Arabs or Islam. Furthermore, it hardly needs saying that because the Middle East is
now so identified with Great Power politics, oil economics, and the simple-minded dichotomy of
freedom-loving, democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian, and terroristic Arabs, the chances of
anything like a clear view of what one talks about in talking about the Near East are depressingly
small.
My own experiences of these matters are in part what made me write this book. The life of an
Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an
almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he
does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political
imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and
it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny. It has
made matters worse for him to remark that no person academically involved with the Near Eastno
Orientalist, that is-has ever in the United States culturally and politically identified himself
wholeheartedly with the Arabs; certainly there have been identifications on some level, but they
have never taken an “acceptable” form as has liberal American identification with Zionism, and
all too frequently they have been radically flawed by their association either with discredited
political and economic interests (oilcompany and State Department Arabists, for example) or with
religion.
The nexus of knowledge and power creating “the Oriental” and in a sense obliterating him as
a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter. Yet it is an intellectual
matter of some very obvious importance. I have been able to put to use my humanistic and
political concerns for the analysis and description of a very worldly matter, the rise, development,
and consolidation of Orientalism. Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically,
even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of
Orientalism has convinced me (and I hope will convince my literary colleagues) that society and
literary culture can only be understood and studied together. In addition, and by an almost
inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western
anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed
36
it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and
political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly
understood. But what I should like also to have contributed here is a better understanding of the
way cultural domination has operated. If this stimulates a new kind of dealing with the Orient,
indeed if it eliminates the “Orient” and “Occident” altogether, then we shall have advanced a little
in the process of what Raymond Williams has called the “unlearning” of “the inherent dominative
mode. ”16
37
1
The Scope of
Orientalism
… le génie inquiet et ambitieux de Europeens … impatient d’employer les nouveaux instruments
de leur puissance…
- Jean -Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, Preface historique (1809),
Description de l’Égypte
38
39
I
Knowing the Oriental
On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on “the problems with
which we have to deal in Egypt. ” These, he said, “belong to a wholly different category” than
those “affecting the Isle of Wight or the West Riding of Yorkshire. ” He spoke with the authority
of a long-time member of Parliament, former private secretary to Lord Salisbury, former chief
secretary for Ireland, former secretary for Scotland, former prime minister, veteran of numerous
overseas crises, achievements, and changes. During his involvement in imperial affairs Balfour
served a monarch who in 1876 had been declared Empress of India; he had been especially well
placed in positions of uncommon influence to follow the Afghan and Zulu wars, the British
occupation of Egypt in 1882, the death of General Gordon in the Sudan, the Fashoda Incident, the
battle of Omdurman, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War. In addition his remarkable social
eminence, the breadth of his learning and wit-he could write on such varied subjects as Bergson,
Handel, theism, and golf-his education at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and his apparent
command over imperial affairs all gave considerable authority to what he told the Commons in
June 1910. But there was still more to Balfour’s tech, or at least to his need for giving it so
didactically and moralistically. Some members were questioning the necessity for “England in
Egypt,” the subject of Alfred Milner’s enthusiastic book of 1892, but here designating a
once-profitable occupation that had become a source of trouble now that Egyptian nationalism
was on the rise and the continuing British presence in Egypt no longer so easy to defend. Balfour,
then, to inform and explain.
Recalling the challenge of J. M. Robertson, the member of Tyneside, Balfour himself put
Robertson’s question again: “What tight have you to take up these airs of superiority with regard
to people whom you choose to call Oriental? ” The choice of “Oriental” was canonical; it had
been employed by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron. It
designated Asia or the East, geographically, morally, culturally. One could speak in Europe of an
Oriental personality, an Oriental
atmosphere, an Oriental tale, Oriental despotism, or an Oriental mode of production, and be
understood. Marx had used the word, and now Balfour was using it; his choice was
understandable and called for no comment whatever.
I take up no attitude of superiority. But I ask [Robertson and anyone else] . . . who has
even the most superficial knowledge of history, if they will look in the face the facts with
40
which a British statesman has to deal when he is put in a position of supremacy over great
races like the inhabitants of Egypt and countries in the East. We know the civilization of
Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country. We know it further back; we
know it more intimately; we know more about it. It goes far beyond the petty span of the
history of our race, which is lost in the prehistoric period at a time when the Egyptian
civilisation had already passed its prime. Look at all the Oriental countries. Do not talk about
superiority or inferiority.
Two great themes dominate his remarks here and in what will follow: knowledge and power, the
Baconian themes. As Balfour justifies the necessity for British occupation of Egypt, supremacy in
his mind is associated with “our” knowledge of Egypt and not principally with military or
economic power. Knowledge to Balfour means surveying a civilization from its origins to its
prime to its decline-and of course, it means being able to do that. Knowledge means rising above
immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently
vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a “fact” which, if it develops, changes; or otherwise
transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even
ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority
over it. And authority here means for “us” to deny autonomy to “it”-the Oriental country-since we
know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it. British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt for Balfour,
and the burdens of knowledge make such questions as inferiority and superiority seem petty ones.
Balfour nowhere denies British superiority and Egyptian inferiority; he takes them for granted as
he describes the consequences of knowledge.
First of all, look at the facts of the case. Western nations as soon as they emerge into
history show the beginnings of those capacities for selfgovernment having merits of their
own. . . . You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly
speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-
41
government. All their great centuries-and they have been very great-have been passed under
despotisms, under absolute government. All their great contributions to civilisation-and they
have been great-have been made under that form of government. Conqueror has succeeded
conqueror; one domination has followed another; but never in all the revolutions of fate and
fortune have you seen one of those nations of its own motion establish what we, from a
Western point of view, call self-government. That is the fact. It is not a question of
superiority and inferiority. I suppose a true Eastern sage would say that the working
government which we have taken upon ourselves in Egypt and elsewhere is not a work
worthy of a philosopher-that it is the dirty work, the inferior work, of carrying on the
necessary labour.
Since these facts are facts, Balfour must then go on to the next part of his argument.
Is it a good thing for these great nations- I admit their greatness --that this absolute
government should be exercised by us? I think it is a good thing. I think that experience
shows that they have got under it far better government than in the whole history of the world
they ever had before, and which not only is a benefit to them, but is undoubtedly a benefit to
the whole of the civilised West. . . . We are in Egypt not merely for the sake of the Egyptians,
though we are there for their sake; we are there also for the sake of Europe at large.
Balfour produces no evidence that Egyptians and “the races with whom we deal” appreciate
or even understand the good that is being done them by colonial occupation. It does not occur to
Balfour, however, to let the Egyptian speak for himself, since presumably any Egyptian who
would speak out is more likely to be “the agitator [who] wishes to raise difficulties” than the good
native who overlooks the “difficulties” of foreign domination. And so, having settled the ethical
problems, Balfour turns at last to the practical ones. “If it is our business to govern, with or
without gratitude, with or without the real and genuine memory of all the loss of which we have
relieved the population [Balfour by no means implies, as part of that loss, the loss or at least the
indefinite postponement of Egyptian independence] and no vivid imagination of All the benefits
which we have given to them; if that is our duty, bow is it to be performed? ” England exports
“our very best to these dies. ” These selfless administrators do their work “amidst tens of
thousands of persons belonging to a different creed, a different
42
race, a different discipline, different conditions of life. ” What makes their work of governing
possible is their sense of being supported at home by a government that endorses what they do.
Yet
directly the native populations have that instinctive feeling that those with whom they have
got to deal have not behind them the might, the authority, the sympathy, the full and
ungrudging support of the country which sent them there, those populations lose all that sense
of order which is the very basis of their civilisation, just as our officers lose all that sense of
power and authority, which is the very basis of everything they can do for the benefit of those
among whom they have been sent.
Balfour’s logic here is interesting, not least for being completely consistent with the premises
of his entire speech. England knows Egypt; Egypt is what England knows; England knows that
Egypt cannot have self-government; England confirms that by occupying Egypt; for the
Egyptians, Egypt is what England has occupied and now governs; foreign occupation therefore
becomes “the very basis” of contemporary Egyptian civilization; Egypt requires, indeed insists
upon, British occupation. But if the special intimacy between governor and governed in Egypt is
disturbed by Parliament’s doubts at home, then “the authority of what . . . is the dominant race
and as I think ought to remain the dominant race-has been undermined. ” Not only does English
prestige suffer; “it is vain for a handful of British officials-endow them how you like, give them
all the qualities of character and genius you can imagine--it is impossible for them to carry out the
great task which in Egypt, not we only, but the civilised world have imposed upon them. ”1
As a rhetorical performance Balfour’s speech is significant for the way in which he plays the
part of and represents a variety of characters. There are of course “the English,” for whom the
pronoun “we” is used with the full weight of a distinguished, powerful man who feels himself to
be representative of all that is best in his nation’s history. Balfour can also speak for the civilized
world, the West, and the relatively small corps of colonial officials in Egypt. If he does not speak
directly for the Orientals, it is because they after all speak another language; yet he knows how
they feel since he knows their history, their reliance upon such as he, and their expectations. Still,
he does speak for them in the sense that what they might have to say, were they to be asked and
might they be able to answer, would somewhat uselessly confirm what is already
evident: that they are a subject race, dominated by a race that knows them and what is good for
them better than they could possibly know themselves. Their great moments were in the past;
they are useful in the modern world only because the powerful and up-to-date empires have
effectively brought them out of the wretchedness of their decline and turned them into
rehabilitated residents of productive colonies.
43
Egypt in particular was an excellent case in point, and Balfour was perfectly aware of how
much right he had to speak as a member of his country’s parliament on behalf of England, the
West, Western civilization, about modern Egypt. For Egypt was not just another colony: it was
the vindication of Western imperialism; it was, until its annexation by England, an almost
academic example of Oriental backwardness; it was to become the triumph of English knowledge
and power. Between 1882, the year in which England occupied Egypt and put an end to the
nationalist rebellion of Colonel Arabi, and 1907, England’s representative in Egypt, Egypt’s
master, was Evelyn Baring (also known as “Over-baring”), Lord Cromer. On July 30, 1907, it
was Balfour in the Commons who had supported the project to give Cromer a retirement prize of
fifty thousand pounds as a reward for what he had done in Egypt. Cromer made Egypt, said
Balfour:
Everything he has touched he has succeeded in . . . . Lord Cromer’s services during the past
quarter of a century have raised Egypt from the lowest pitch of social and economic
degradation until it now stands among Oriental nations, I believe, absolutely alone in its
prosperity, financial and moral. 2
How Egypt’s moral prosperity was measured, Balfour did not venture to say. British exports to
Egypt equaled those to the whole of Africa; that certainly indicated a sort of financial prosperity,
for Egypt and England (somewhat unevenly) together. But what tally mattered was the unbroken,
all-embracing Western tutelage of an Oriental country, from the scholars, missionaries,
business-men, soldiers, and teachers who prepared and then implemented the occupation to the
high functionaries like Cromer and Balfour who saw themselves as providing for, directing, and
sometimes even forcing Egypt’s rise from Oriental neglect to its present lonely eminence.
If British success in Egypt was as exceptional as Balfour said, it was by no means an
inexplicable or irrational success. Egyptian
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affairs had been controlled according to a general theory expressed both by Balfour in his notions
about Oriental civilization and by Cromer in his management of everyday business in Egypt. The
most important thing about ‘the theory during the first decade of the twentieth century was that it
worked, and worked staggeringly well. The argument, when reduced to its simplest form, was
clear, it was precise, it was easy to grasp. There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The
former dominate; the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied,
their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or
another Western power. That Balfour and Cromer, as we shall soon see, could strip humanity
down to such ruthless cultural and racial essences was not at all an indication of their particular
viciousness. Rather it was an indication of how streamlined a general doctrine had become by the
time they put it to use-how streamlined and effective.
Unlike Balfour, whose theses on Orientals pretended to objective universality, Cromer spoke
about Orientals specifically as what he had ruled or had to deal with, first in India, then for the
twenty-five years in Egypt during which he emerged as the paramount consulgeneral in
England’s empire. Balfour’s “Orientals” are Cromer’s “subject races,” which he made the topic
of a long essay published in the Edinburgh Review in January 1908. Once again, knowledge of
subject races or Orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives
power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of
information and control. Cromer’s notion is that England’s empire will not dissolve if such things
as militarism and commercial egotism at home and “free institutions” in the colony (as opposed
to British government “according to the Code of Christian morality”) are kept in check.