To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly...

To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus, innumerable Oriental “experts” and “hands,” an Oriental professorate, a complex array of “Oriental” ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelt , sensuality), many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use-the list can be extended more or less indefinitely.

My point is that Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain…