Orientalism is Edward Said’s concept, developed in Orientalism (1978), describing the body of Western scholarship, literature, art, and political thought that constructed the ‘Orient’ — roughly, the Middle East and Asia — as exotic, irrational, timeless, and inferior, in contrast to a rational, dynamic, progressive ‘West’. Said argued that this representation was not a neutral description but a form of power: it legitimised European imperial domination by presenting it as the natural order of things.

The argument

Said drew on Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse — the idea that systems of knowledge shape what can be thought and said, and that these systems are inseparable from power. European scholars, travellers, and administrators produced a vast body of ‘knowledge’ about the Orient that structured how Europeans saw non-European peoples. This knowledge enabled domination: you can only govern, educate, or improve people you claim to understand. Orientalism was the epistemological infrastructure of imperialism.

How to use it in an answer

Orientalism is relevant to questions about the historiography of empire, representations of colonial peoples, and the relationship between knowledge and power. It also provides a framework for critiquing sources: a British colonial administrator’s description of Indian or Egyptian society should be read not just as evidence about those societies but as evidence of how British colonial power constructed its objects of governance. That kind of source analysis — reading sources against the grain — is high-level AO2.

Further reading: Postcolonialism · Postcolonialism (Ideas) · British Imperial Decline
← Back to Key Concepts