“Orientalism - Western Conceptions of the Orient”

Seite 41 From 1815 to 1914 European direct colonial dominion expanded from about 35 percent of the earth’s surface to about 85 percent of it. For much of the nineteenth Century, as Lord Salisbury put it in 1881, the common view of France and England of the Orient was was : “if you are bent on meddling in a country in which you are deeply interested —you have three courses open to you. You may renounce—or monopolize—or share. Renouncing would have been to place the French across our road to India. Monopolizing would have been near the risk of war. So we resolved to share.“ What they shared, however, was not only land or profit or rule; it was the kind of intellectual power I have been calling Orientalism. 42 If the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority, then we must be prepared to note how in its development and subsequent history, Orientalism deepened and even hardened the distinction. 108 No better instance exists today of what Anwar Abdel Malek calls „the hegemonism of possessing minorities“ and anthropocentrism allied with Europocentrism: a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition „it“ is not quite as human as „we“ are. There is no purer example than this of dehumanized thought.

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