What Contribution has the “Orientalism Debate” made to Recent Historical Research?

“The Orient”, or “The East”, is described in an elderly edition of Webster’s Dictionary as the “civilised countries of Asia, both ancient or modern.”  It goes on to consider the word “Oriental” as particularly suitable for “a person raised in one of the three great civilisations of Asia, the Mohammedan, Indian or Chinese-Japanese.”  Those who read the dictionary at the time of its publication might well have been under the impression that “The Orient” was a place of great dignity, but perhaps also of great mystery and exoticism, whose greatest achievements were now behind it.  Furthermore its name seemed to imply that it was on the eastern periphery of human affairs, with Europe clearly at the centre.

This popular image of The Orient remained unchallenged for much of the century, even though the political circumstances in which it found itself changed dramatically due to the outbreak of wars and the disbanding of the European empires.  However, as historical interest in discourse theory grew, attitudes surrounding “The Orient” and the manner in which they had been contrived were eventually analysed in this manner, most famously, and controversially, by Edward Said in 1978 in his book, “Orientalism”.

Said’s work challenged these preconceived notions and stereotypes about the Orient, stating that they were entirely artificial creations, made under the assumption of European superiority with the express purpose of dominating the inferior, passive Orient.  Indeed, he believed “The Orient” did not exist as such, being an imaginary construction in European minds that bore little relationship to modern Asia.  His strong opinions did not please everyone but at least focused attention on the manner in which historical knowledge about Asia had been portrayed in the past, and the direction which current research should now take.

“A discourse,” explained Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, “is a system of statements within which, and by which, the world can be known.”  However, the French philosopher Michel Foucault showed that its language could be used to confine knowledge within strict boundaries, discarding any information which failed to meet its pre-set requirements.  Those who established these limits were therefore able to wield power over the subject of the discourse, choosing to portray them in whatever manner suited their purposes.  Despite its ideals of objectivity and universal truth, Foucault believed (according to Richard J Evans) that the study of history was unavoidably tainted by this, and could be little more than “a fiction of narrative order imposed on the irreducible chaos of events in the interests of the exercise of power.”  The most effective way of analysing such discourses is through textual analysis – a detailed examination of key documents where the immediate or surface meaning is put to one side in favour of the deeper meanings and assumptions conveyed beneath (often unintentionally).  Jacques Derrida coined the term “deconstruction” for such a process, which reduced a text to its base components so the underlying purpose could be seen clearly.

Edward Said used Foucault’s discourse theories and Derrida’s deconstruction techniques to argue that the European representation of “The Orient” was a closed, controlled system which, in the words of D.A. Washbrook, “represented Oriental subjects in arbitrary, demeaning, and inferiorizing ways, while claiming to speak in the name of objective science and universal truth.”  This was done entirely for the benefit of the Europeans with little concern for the Oriental point of view.  “Orientalism represented a construct, not a reality,” wrote John MacKenzie, “an emblem of domination and a weapon of power.”

Said considered Orientalism to occur in three different forms.  It could be a process of imagination -  the thinking that made the basic distinction between East and West as a starting point for theories, literature and policies for the Orient.  The most commonly understood definition of it is as an academic discipline – the study of the Orient and its languages.  It was for this purpose that the School of Oriental Studies was established as a college of the University of London in 1916.  However, the School’s secondary founding purpose illustrated Said’s third and final definition – by providing an education for the civil servants and administrators bound for careers in Asia it assisted Orientalism in its form as “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient”.  He believed that it was through this structure that the West was able to assert its hegemony and authority through the region, using the knowledge it gained to further consolidate its power.  The two more imaginative forms of Orientalism were deployed, in Said’s opinion, to assist the operation of the third.  Much of his book is devoted to the form of this assistance and the effect it had upon the region.  “My hope,” he wrote, “is to illustrate the formidable structure of cultural domination, and specifically for formerly colonised peoples, the dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or upon others.”

Because of his personal background and research interests, Said decided to restrict the majority of analysis in the book to the British and French (and later American) portrayal of the Arab and Islamic, world.  This methodology that attracted plenty of criticism following the book’s publication and will be discussed later in the essay.  He believed that the Far Eastern nations were regarded with a similar attitude by the West (as the Webster’s Dictionary definition demonstrated) and that other European nations such as Germany and Russia behaved in a similar manner.  However, the mass of British, French and American work, and more significantly its consistency made it the most suitable material for his analysis.

European interaction with the Orient had obviously been a constant throughout history.  Alexander the Great’s conquests extended into Persia and India, whilst Islamic military success centuries later led to the conquest of Spain and much of South Eastern Europe.  The popular imagination of the Orient consisted of ancient empires, tales of the crusades and, perhaps most significantly, the stories of the Bible.  From the Eighteenth Century, however, the range of representation of the Orient began to expand enormously as new scientific studies were developed and long-distance travel became more frequent.  A so-called “Renaissance of Oriental thought” took place, as ancient oriental texts were rediscovered and languages such as Sanskrit and Arabic were studied and translated.  Historical lessons from Europe were compared with those of the Orient – Edward Gibbon for example considered the decline of the Roman Empire in the light of the rise of Islam.  Some of the “Romantic” intellectuals at the time such as Frederic Schlegel believed that study of the Orient, such as the culture and religion of India, would help to refresh the culture and society of the West, which they perceived to be under strain from materialism and early industrialisation.

However, Said makes it clear that, even at this early stage, there was little possibility of treating the Orient as an equal to the West.  “What mattered,” he wrote, “was not so much Asia as Asia’s use to Europe.”  Oriental knowledge was thus portrayed as being “discovered” or “rescued” – “brought to light” from a condition where it had been ill-used or ignored, but could now be deployed in the service of modern science.  Said puts great emphasis on Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 as the defining moment when knowledge of the Orient was put to use for pragmatic, military purposes for the subjugation of one country by another.  Before his invasion, Napoleon consulted his scholars, such as the Compte de Volney, who had travelled extensively in Egypt, to gain a full understanding of the country’s society and culture so that he could select the most appropriate strategy.  His information allowed him to wage a political campaign so that he could persuade the Egyptians that he was fighting on behalf of them and Islam against their rivals the Mamelukes, a strategy that proved to be immediately successful.  “Napoleon’s project demonstrated the most conscious marriage of academic knowledge and political ambition,” wrote Ashcroft and Ahluwalia.

This was the point when “modern” Orientalism, as portrayed in Said’s third definition, became an established reality.  “After Napoleon, then,” he wrote, “the very language of Orientalism changed radically.  Its descriptive realism was upgraded and became not merely a style of representation but a language, indeed a means of creation.”  Although the occupation of Egypt would not last long, its lasting legacy was a vast amount of information, systematically collected and documented and returned to France.  This was compiled in the vast, twenty-three volume, “Description de l’Égypte”,published between 1809 and 1828.  Such an archive established some of the conventions regarding the collection of Oriental knowledge.  It encouraged men such as Silvestre de Sacy, the first president of the French Société Asiatique in 1822, to continue the process of “uncovering” Oriental documents, selecting and presenting fragments within compilations that appeared to cover the full extent of knowledge of the East.  Ernest Renan came from the next generation of French intellectuals and began to systemise the insights of Sacy and others into a more rigid discourse.  In his specialised field of philology in particular, he produced his own classifications for Oriental languages, making divisions between Semitic and Indo-European and Semitic languages and suggesting that the former were less sophisticated and fully developed than the latter.  “What Renan and Sacy tried to do,” wrote Said, “was to reduce the Orient to a kind of human flatness, which exposed its characteristics easily to scrutiny and removed it from its complicating humanity.”  Orientalism, and Oriental people, were essentially “objects” of study, examined at a distance and classified into artificially imposed groupings such as races, tribes and castes.  The “otherness” of Oriental people when compared to Europeans was always assumed and knowledge was steadily collated and referred to along clearly defined lines.  “Orientalism was fully formalised into a repeatedly produced copy of itself,” declared Said.

As the Nineteenth Century progressed and the European empires grew more extensive, the Orientalist discourse grew ever harder.  “Essentialist ideas” about the Orient – backwardness, despotism, exoticism, sensuality – became a coherent and unchallenged stereotype, with little expectation of development or change.  The Orient became regarded as the traditional entitlement of the European nations, whose administration was considered beneficial to the Oriental people who were considered unable to look after themselves.  Said includes an extract from a speech by Lord Balfour in 1910 when he stated, “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.”  Indeed, even those Europeans with great empathy for the people of the Orient, such as T.E.Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia”, still regarded themselves as their natural leaders and representatives.  Completing his epilogue to the “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, he wrote, “I had dreamed…of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us.  Mecca was to lead to Damascus; Damascus to Anatolia, and afterwards to Bagdad…Fantasies, these will seem, to such as are able to call my beginning an ordinary effort.”

After the First World War it became clear that European hegemony could no longer be assumed.  Claims for independence were steadily growing, and the precious political balance now appeared to be under threat.  However, Said believes that the European leaders still considered the initiative to remain with them.  The non-European continued to be depicted in Oriental discourse as part of a large mass, rather than an individual capable of making decisions.  “The earth is seething with incoherent power and unorganised intelligence,” wrote John Buchan in 1922. “Have you ever reflected on the case of China?  There you have millions of quick brains stifled in trumpery crafts.  They have no direction, no driving power, so the sum of their efforts is futile, and the world laughs at China.”  Even after the Second World War, the process of decolonisation was often presented as a reaction to the West rather than a self-determined movement.  Furthermore, Said considers the United States to have replaced Britain and France as the most influential power within Asia and Middle East and a continuing source of Orientalist dogmas, including a continuing assumption of absolute difference between the West and the Orient, a preference for abstractions of the Orient over direct evidence, a depiction of the Orient as uniform and unchanging and the presentation of the Orient as something to be feared, or controlled.

Although Said admits much progress has taken place within Asian historiography, citing the formation of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1960 to reconsider East Asian history as a particularly welcome development, he believes his own area of interest, Islam and the Middle East, remains tainted with Orientalist discourse and stereotype.  He offers few alternatives to the established thinking, apart from an encouragement to remain critical and objective within historical research and to focus on “the common enterprise of promoting human community” rather than on racial and national distinctions. 

As was mentioned earlier, Said’s work has generated plenty of criticism from a variety of sources, from both the “conservative” Orientalist establishment he singled out within his work, and from later generations of historians.  Perhaps the most fundamental criticism of it was its disregard for what many considered to be essential historical practices.  “Magisterial in scope though it is, “Orientalism is an amateur work,” wrote Ashcroft and Ahluwalia.  John MacKenzie considered it to “eclectic”, “polemical and disjointed”.  Perhaps the strongest words came from Bernard Lewis, portrayed as an agent of conservative Orientalism within Said’s book.  He considered it to be a “false” thesis that “bordered on the absurd” and “revealed a disquieting lack of knowledge of what scholars do and what scholarship is all about.”  Examples seemed to be overtly selected from the Middle East for a work that was supposed to be considering the whole of Asia.  Perhaps more damningly, historians considered Said’s personal experiences and political beliefs to have infected his historical objectivity.  As an Arab Palestinian now working in the West it could be construed that he used his book to channel his “rage” following his experiences and the treatment of his fellow countrymen against a convenient and obvious target.  In his afterword to the second edition of the book in 1995, Said accepted the criticism of inconsistency, as he was writing “a partisan book, not a theoretical machine”.  He believed that the “variability and unpredictability” of Orientalism made it impossible to write a straightforward analysis, and hoped to preserve (somewhat confusingly) its combination of “consistency and inconsistency”.  However, he denied accusations that his political beliefs had affected his scholarship.  He regretted his work being portrayed as encouraging fundamentalist movements against the West, and declared himself to be against all “gloating and uncritical nationalism” from whichever side it came.

Said’s “binary” portrayal of Orientalism was considered by many to be too simplistic.  His portrayal of unchallenged Western dominance in Asia is an extreme generalisation.  Furthermore, it implied that the citizens of the West remained in total support for the colonising process, running the danger of creating its own “Occidentalist” discourse, and reducing the status of the people of the West to mere objects within it.  “He represents European culture in ways which essentialise it, objectify it, demean, de-rationalise and de-historicise it,” wrote D.A.Washbrook.  Speaking more generally on the colonial discourse movement that Said’s work encouraged, he argued that “Much recent work has shown substantially greater “difference” in European perception than colonial discourse theory would allow – including many views favourable to non-European scholarship.”

Critics also focused attention on Said and his supporters’ inability to provide alternatives to the Orientalist structure, focusing exclusively on critiques that “can scarcely be held to constitute a coherent body of theory itself”.  By always going on the offensive, it was possible for the critics of Orientalism to overlook errors within their own analysis.  “Said’s theoretical inconsistency and tendency to slip into precisely those sins he castigates undermines much of his Orientalist structure,” wrote MacKenzie.  Dennis Porter believed that Said ran the danger of being “tripped up” by his own discourse.  If Said was correct in saying that the “Orient” did not exist and could not be “known” then perhaps Orientalism was the best alternative available for understanding it, particularly by considering the Oriental texts to be “heterogeneous” and able to facilitate dialogue between East and West without the codified knowledge and assumptions of superiority that the deconstructionists claimed to perceive everywhere.  Aijaz Ahmad also found fault with Said’s analysis, believing it to be too simplistic to be applicable in the “real world” and that it continued to depersonalise the experiences of the colonised peoples, so that “colonialism is now held responsible not only for its own cruelties but, conveniently enough, for ours too.”

John MacKenzie and others also criticised Said for concentrating on too narrow a field, an accusation also levelled at another of his works, “Culture and Imperialism”.  Discussing “Orientalism”, MacKenzie wrote, “It is characteristic of his work that neither economics nor class plays a particularly central role if indeed any role at all.”  Reina Lewis meanwhile questioned the omission of the role of women from his analysis, arguing that Said, “never questions women’s apparent absence as producers of Orientalist discourse or as agents within colonial power.  This mirrors the traditional view that women were not involved in colonial expansion.”

Said made little attempt to consider the impact and effect of popular culture, concentrating largely on elite texts, which he accused of hypocritically claiming to transcend human affairs whilst continuing to disseminate Orientalist or Imperialist doctrine.  Examples he used in “Imperialism and Culture” to illustrate his argument included Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” and Verdi’s “Aida”.  His critics were not convinced.  James Clifford believed that an artist or writer received their inspiration from a huge variety of sources, and furthermore, their work was very unlikely to be interpreted uniformly, particularly if it was destined for a global audience.  James MacKenzie considered culture to be “unstable, heterogeneous and internally resistant” which was often able to “quarantine” itself from the prevailing political ideology.  Concluding his work on the relationship between Orientalism and various arts, including music, theatre, painting and architecture, he wrote, “In all of these arts, the result was often…a dramatic liberation from existing conventions and constricting restraints; and in each of them the repeated appeal to a different cultural tradition infused radical movements more frequently than it propped up existing conservative ones.”

It is clear that Said’s work was not universally accepted, but it still provided an excellent stimulus for historical research, refreshing the debate in some areas, and encouraging historians to pursue new lines of enquiry.  Stefan Tanaka for example, in his book “Japan’s Orient”, examined Japan’s reaction to the challenge of the West through the creation of its own “Orientalism”, creating an idealised common origin for itself and China (Toyo) which justified it being able to face the Europeans on equal terms.  “Because the Orient was the origin of modern Western history,” wrote Tanaka, “Japan, by turning to toyo for its own past, made Asia the common ground and locus of comparison and contestation with regard to the West.”  Following the upheavals of the Meiji Renovation and its modernisation programme, Japan’s scholars turned to their past to find the authority and precedence to justify political development and, later on, military and cultural expansion.  “In this effort,” wrote Tanaka, the various pasts became an archive from which they could unearth the necessary evidence to construct a historical narrative.”  As Japan’s expansion involved military conflict with China, its history had to be referred to in order to justify its superiority over the Chinese whilst remaining culturally distinct from the West.  There was no evidence that the ancient kingdom of “Yamatori” from which the Japanese language and emperor system were said to have emerged ever existed, but they became an accepted part of the historical discourse.  “The Japanese historical profession constructed a history that secularised relations between the state and religion,” wrote Tanaka, “equated the activities and interests of the elite class with those of the nation, and ignored other civilisations not directly related to its own ideology.”  Furthermore, their work could not simply be imposed upon the nation – it had to be accepted by the Japanese people.  They were prepared to grant their consensus because it provided them with an opportunity to share a unique national identity and experience.

Although it was accused of presenting a “binary” analysis himself of the relationship between East and West, Said’s work at least encouraged greater thought to be given of the impact of the West in Asia and upon its colonies.  Paul Cohen, for example, strongly criticises assumptions that the relationship between China and the West can be entirely defined in terms of “impact” and “response”.  He argued that presenting it in these terms “predefines what is important about nineteenth-century Chinese history in terms of a set of questions prompted by the Sino-Japanese encounter.”  This could discourage enquiry into aspects of history that were unrelated to the Western presence at that time, and interpret reforms and social changes as responses to the West when their inspiration was actually indigenous.  Describing the Taiping Rebellion, for example, he wrote, “The response is to a Chinese situation, in some respects (such as population pressure) unprecedented in nature, and the West’s role is largely confined to that of an influencing agent….(This seems) to suggest that in a Chinese setting a “pure” response to the West was virtually an impossibility.”

The Orientalism debate has also made a major impact on historians of Imperialism and Colonisation.  Many have taken to task the simplistic view that Europe’s policy towards the Orient and its empire was merely a matter of dominance due to superior military and ideological force.  There is now a greater examination of the process of continuity between pre-colonised and colonised societies.  As Napoleon discovered in Egypt, the key to success was securing the co-operation of the local leaders, who were happy to share in the associations and benefits of European power.  “The growing realisation of the importance of indigenous peoples to the building of European overseas empires in the age of “high” imperialism,” wrote Michael Adas, “has led in turn to a fundamental recasting of our understanding of the process of conquest and the consolidation of colonial rule.”  Responsibility for the administration of the empire was in the hands of the European powers’ indigenous allies, who were often members of the regional gentry or leaders of the local community and continued to occupy the position within the hierarchy that they had occupied prior to colonisation.

Other “Imperial” issues are now studied at a more sophisticated level than the previous, two dimensional, perception of the relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans.  The concept of “Informal Empire” for example is, now given greater attention, considering the impact of Europe without the necessity of military and administrative control.  If this remains an aspect of “Imperialism”, then it could be argued that this system of collaboration could continue even after decolonisation.  Indeed, even decolonisation itself is now being examined as more than simply an inevitable reaction to the West.  Indigenous resistance, not just in violent uprisings but also in more discreet, long-term movements such as absenteeism and disobedience, is being investigated to see what contribution it made to the final process of European withdrawal, as well as the ways in which society was able to adapt and reform itself after colonisation.

“The central development of modern history,” wrote Hank Wesseling, “is the increasing interconnection and interweaving of various formerly isolated civilisations and economies.”  The “Orientalism Debate” appeared in concert with a period of dramatic cultural change within the historical profession.  Together, they encouraged historians to discard previously held views and perceptions about the nature and portrayal of history and search instead for new methods of analysis, which could be used to research and depict historical experience.  The relationship between East and West, or between Europe and her colonies, might no longer be the most appropriate area of comparison.  Indeed greater benefits might be gained by comparing the fortunes of two colonised countries – Vietnam and Kenya, perhaps, or the social changes experienced by the indigenous peoples of the Dutch East Indies and Australia.  Social groups such as these, and others, previously neglected in the more rigid confines of Oriental and Imperial history such as women (both colonisers and the colonised), criminals, or children, are receiving much greater historical attention.

The “Orientalism Debate” challenged popularly held stereotypes of Asia and forced historians to reconsider whether their previous research had been tainted by a discourse and assumptions of which they had been unaware.  By encouraging historians to think more critically, but at the same time carry out their research with much greater imagination in their choice of subject areas and methodologies, it has undoubtedly been of great benefit to recent historical research.

Bibliography

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Ahluwalia, P.

Adas, M (ed.)	Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1993)	

Burke, P. (ed.)		New Perspectives on Historical Writing  (London: Polity Press, Second Edition, 1991)

Cohen, P.A.	Discovering Recent History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)

Emmer, P.C. &	Reappraisals in Overseas History (Leiden, Leiden University Press, 1979)
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Lawrence, T.E.	Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London, Jonathan Cape, 1935)

MacKenzie, J.M.	Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995)

Mangan, J.A. (ed.)	Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990)

Porter, B.	The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism: 1850-1995 (London, Longman, Third Edition, 1996)

Said, E.W.	Orientalism (London, Penguin, Second Edition, 1995)

Tanaka, S.		Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993)

Winks, R.W. (ed.)	The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume V: Historiography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999)