Orientalism was published by Pantheon Books in 1978, and its impact on the humanities has been compared to that of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the philosophy of science: it changed the terms of debate so fundamentally that subsequent discussion is conducted either in its framework or in reaction against it. Edward Said (1935–2003), a Palestinian-American literary critic and public intellectual at Columbia University, argued that Western knowledge of “the Orient” — the vast region stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to East Asia — was not a neutral body of scholarship but a system of power that served the interests of European imperialism.
Said’s central concept is that Orientalism is a “discourse” — a term he borrowed from Michel Foucault — a system of knowledge production that shapes what can be said, thought, and known about a given subject. Western scholars, diplomats, novelists, and artists did not describe the East as it actually was; they constructed an Orient that served Western needs: exotic, irrational, sensual, despotic, and in need of Western guidance. This constructed Orient then justified colonial intervention — if Eastern peoples were incapable of self-governance, Western rule was not exploitation but improvement.
Said traced this discourse through three centuries of European engagement with the East, from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 (accompanied by scholars and artists who would produce the Description de l’Égypte) through the high imperialism of the nineteenth century (Flaubert in Egypt, Renan on the Semitic languages, the British administration of India) to the American Cold War engagement with the Middle East. He examined individual texts — philological treatises, novels, travel accounts, political documents — and showed how they shared assumptions about Western superiority and Eastern inferiority that transcended genre and period.
The book generated enormous controversy, and the criticisms have been as influential as the original argument. Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies, accused Said of ignoring the genuine scholarly achievements of Orientalist philology and of conflating academic study with political ideology. Other critics argued that Said’s framework was too totalizing — it left no room for the complexity of individual scholars who might have genuinely sympathetic relationships with the cultures they studied. Still others pointed out that Said’s geographic scope was too narrow (he said little about East Asia or sub-Saharan Africa) and his temporal framework too focused on the modern period (Orientalist attitudes had ancient roots).
Despite these criticisms, the book’s core insight — that knowledge about other cultures is never politically innocent — has proved durable. It launched the academic field of postcolonial studies, influenced literary criticism, anthropology, history, and political science, and gave scholars in formerly colonized nations a theoretical framework for understanding how Western knowledge had participated in their subordination.
Collecting Orientalism
First edition (Pantheon Books, New York, 1978): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Without jacket: $40–$100
- Later editions and paperbacks: $10–$25
A cornerstone of twentieth-century intellectual history. First editions in good dust jackets are increasingly scarce and valuable.