Middle East, “French politicians, merchants and soldiers had developed a more predatory interest in that region” and “[t]here were plenty of French theorists ready to argue that Ottoman Turkey, a typical Oriental despotism, was in full decay, because … despotism conduced inevitably to slavery, polygamy and softness.”44 The founding and expansion of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was explicitly linked to British foreign expansion, while the “belated beginnings” of American Orientalism paralleled the United States’ growing hunger for oil and “ambitions to supplant Britain as the leading power in the Middle East.”45 Irwin reluctantly acknowledges “it must be conceded that Said has perhaps as much as half a point.”46
Said is unfortunately prone to dramatic overstatements in Orientalism, which may explain why specialists have found his influence so galling. Take, for example, the following: “Islam excepted, the Orient for Europe was until the nineteenth century a domain with a continuous history of unchallenged Western dominance. This is patently true of the British experience in India, the Portuguese experience in the East Indies, China, and Japan, and the French and Italian experiences in various regions of the Orient.”47 One would not be advised to take this as a guide to the history of European influence in Asia. Yet a broader point, which might have been more seriously pursued, is that financial support for the development of European intellectual study of Middle Eastern and Asian languages and cultures corresponded with the growth in European commercial and political interests in the regions. France’s École Spéciale des Langues Orientales was founded in 1795 between phases of French economic colonialism in Asia and in prelude to the Napoleonic and later eras of direct French rule in Indochina, and the school’s founding document stated that its mission was to teach living Oriental languages “of recognized utility for politics and commerce.”48 The distinguished British Sinologist Herbert A. Giles (1845–1935) complained at the end of his career that while a professor he had had “only one student at Cambridge who really wished to learn the language for its own sake”: the rest were aspiring diplomats and missionaries.49 Britain’s celebrated School of Oriental Studies (“African” was added in 1938) was founded in 1916 at the height of direct British imperial rule across the globe. Its Royal Charter of Incorporation noted that the founding of the school “would be for the public advantage.”50 Irwin himself states that “Orientalists had sold to the government the idea of the School as an imperial training centre,” although “most of those appointed seem to have been academics who despised the idea of vocational training.”51 Regardless of the high ideals of scholars, by the 1940s the British government clearly found the school invaluable for indirectly aiding its control of the Middle East: “Towards the end of the [Second World] war, Britain directly or indirectly controlled most of the Middle East from Iran to Morocco. One consequence of this was that in London … (SOAS) was crowded with servicemen, diplomats and administrators taking language and culture courses before setting out for the Far East, India and Sudan.”52 In the 1940s, dismayed by Britain’s decline, a government committee recommended pumping resources into the school to help reassert its far eastern influence.53 Irwin blames Said for destroying his discipline, but the decline of European eastern imperialism in the later twentieth century is a more likely cause. Pure as the motives of the academic Orientalists may have been, those of their funding bodies and many of their students may have often been more pragmatic.54 Orientalism, for all its faults and errors, poses piercing questions about western production of scholarship and cultural representations of non-western cultures that one should not ignore in any study of colonialist or imperialist cultural encounters.
Yet—and here we return to the central point of this book—“colonialism” or “imperialism” does not describe relations between Latin Christians and Asian peoples before the turn of the sixteenth century. Prior to that, to be sure, mercantile, diplomatic, and missionary activities placed a European toehold in Asian locations that would pave the way for later large-scale expansion. It seems likely, furthermore, that the fifteenth-century Portuguese had commercial ambitions in the Indies and lacked only technological advancement and maritime knowledge to bring them to fruition. The exploits of Vasco da Gama, deployed by the Portuguese crown in 1497–98 to find routes and establish a trading base in western India to help gain access to the eastern spice trade and overturn Venetian monopolies, show how quickly western European encounters in the distant east turned ugly with the growth in commercial ambitions. Soon after he landed on the Indian coast near Calicut, the trajectory of western colonial aggression with which we are now familiar became apparent. By the time that Afonso de Albuquerque was planting a definitively Portuguese presence on the Malabar Coast and around the Indian Ocean in the early sixteenth century, European interests in the East had taken a radically belligerent turn.55 In 1503 Portugal set up a trading outpost in Cochin (Kochi, in Kerala). Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Portugal and the Netherlands established an extensive network of trading stations in south and southeast Asia, and the French and British became active in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries while the Russian Empire expanded steadily in the north. The greatest formal European possessions in Asia were the Dutch East Indies (1800–1942), British India (1858–1947), and French Indochina (1887–1954), but the European nations at different times held a large number of other desirable territories, both large (for example, Burma, Ceylon/ Sri Lanka) and small (Macau, Malacca, Hong Kong). D. K. Fieldhouse, in an oft-quoted statistic, calculates that by the 1930s 84.6 percent of the world’s land surface was covered by European colonies or ex-colonies, and “parts of Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Tibet, China, Siam and Japan were the only states which had never been under formal European government.”56 Given that every one of these exceptions is an Asian country, and compared with the total or near total European domination of the Americas, Australasia, Africa, and the Pacific, Asia might appear to have escaped relatively lightly. Yet the phrase “formal European government” (or colonialism proper) veils a good deal of colonialist or imperialist activity, especially commercial. Before Asian locations became formal crown colonies they had often long been in the hands of trading companies, notably the various East India companies (Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British). China, apart from Russian Manchuria and some small but significant areas such as Hong Kong and Macau, was not formally in European hands, but it was subject to intense economic pressure, particularly from the British from the time of the First Opium War (1839–42). American military and economic interests in Asia saw the growth of its “informal empire” there from the turn of the twentieth century. From the late eighteenth century through to the mid-twentieth, south, east, and southeast Asia were subject to European colonizing forces.57 Varied as these forces undoubtedly were, no one could seriously argue that these factors prevailed before the early sixteenth century; indeed, they did not achieve their full potency before the eighteenth century.
Western Europeans did not suddenly develop a new, Orientalist sensibility in the early sixteenth century. A problem for early modern and modern historians is to identify at what point it becomes possible to speak of Orientalism as an explanatory framework for European writings about India and the far East. Joan-Pau Rubiés, for example, denies that the concept is adequate for describing Portuguese writing on India up to the end of the sixteenth century.58 Robert Markley also demonstrates that laudatory perspectives on China remained powerful right through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.59 Both China and Japan, partly as a result of Jesuit influence that sought to emphasize those nations’ high levels of civilization and rationality, remained the subject of European admiration at least until the early eighteenth century.60 It appears that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are the best available candidates for the high-water mark of Orientalism, in all senses of the word. Stereotyping, homogenizing, and demonizing became regular, but never inevitable, features of western discourse on far eastern regions only from the early eighteenth century. They were never more than part of the story, yet assertions of European superiority such as Samuel Purchas’s in 1613 (quoted below, pp. 63–64) may indicate the beginning of a sea change. His claims for European greatness are illustrative of the profound shift in consciousness wrought by European exploration and conquest of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. That supreme secular self-confidence or ethnocentrism has few distant echoes in the writings of our medieval
