18th century (7a2caa4c)

The eighteenth century is a turning point in the book’s account of Orientalism: European inquiry extended beyond the narrowly religious conception of Islam and drew on travel, historical comparison, and new classifications, while its expanding knowledge continued to place Europe in the position of observer and interpreter. The period widened the field of study and made more historically attentive encounters possible, yet also prepared the institutional and intellectual structures through which the Orient could be ordered for Western use.

From a Predominantly Islamic Orient to Wider Horizons

For much of the period before the middle of the eighteenth century, the Orient in European cultural memory most rigorously meant the Islamic Orient. Earlier reference points included the fall of Constantinople, the Crusades, and the conquests of Sicily and Spain. These events marked Islam as a perceived danger, while the broader Asian world remained present in European knowledge without being wholly absorbed into that image. The book describes a change by the mid-century: repositories of Oriental learning no longer meant primarily Islam, the Arabs, or the Ottomans, as the range of inquiry began to expand.

India occupied a different place in this European map. After Portugal established its first bases there in the early sixteenth century, European presence grew; England’s long period of largely commercial activity, from 1600 to 1758, gave way to political domination. India did not represent an indigenous threat to Europe in the way Islam was imagined to do. Rather, the weakening of native authority opened the subcontinent to European rivalry and control, encouraging a proprietary attitude that was not matched by reliable knowledge. Entries on Indo-Persian subjects in Barthélemy d'Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale relied on Islamic sources, and until the early nineteenth century the term Oriental languages was often treated as synonymous with Semitic languages.

The broadening of European knowledge did not immediately undo that narrow inheritance. Sanskrit, Indian religion, and Indian history gained the status of scientific knowledge only after William Jones’s efforts in the late eighteenth century; even his interest in India developed through his prior knowledge of Islam. European access to Indian wealth also meant crossing Islamic provinces, which Europeans regarded as a dangerous religious passage. Britain and France fought over India in 1744–1748 and again in 1756–1763; by 1769, Britain had emerged in practical economic and political control of the subcontinent. The book places Napoleon’s later decision to strike at Egypt against this imperial background: Egypt lay on the Islamic route to Britain’s Oriental empire.

Exploration, Comparison, and Classification

The century’s widening horizons were not produced by Oriental scholarship alone. Travel literature, imagined utopias, moral voyages, and scientific reports brought distant societies into more sustained view. The book situates the discoveries of Anquetil-Duperron and Jones within a larger European field of exploration that included the voyages of Cook, Bougainville, Tournefort, and Adanson, as well as reports by William Dampier, French traders in the Pacific, and Jesuit missionaries in China and the Americas. But this enlargement did not displace Europe from the center: Europe remained the principal observer, and travelers’ accounts helped secure colonies and ethnocentric perspectives.

Historical comparison also changed how European writers approached other societies. Eighteenth-century historical anthropology could treat civilizations as objects of comparison rather than only as religious adversaries. Gibbon could read the rise of Islam alongside the decline of Rome; Vico could understand modern civilization through the poetic and supposedly barbaric beginnings of earlier societies. Such comparisons could direct European attention to non-European sources and help Europeans reconsider their own history. But they also made the Orient legible within frameworks devised by European scholars.

A related change was the multiplication of classifications. Philosophers, historians, encyclopedists, and essayists organized peoples into physiological and moral types, assigning broad characteristics to Europeans, Asiatics, Africans, and others. Linnaeus, Montesquieu, Samuel Johnson, Blumenbach, Soemmerring, and Kant exemplify the range of writers through whose work such designations circulated. In the nineteenth century, the book argues, moral generalizations could acquire additional force when linked to theories of inherited or genetic type. The Oriental was then described through supposedly universal traits, including a primitive condition and a distinctive spiritual background.

The book identifies four connected currents behind modern Orientalism: geographical expansion, historical comparison, sympathy or selective identification with cultures beyond Europe, and classification. Together, these currents helped detach European study from an exclusively Christian and biblical framework. India, China, and Japan, as well as Sumer, Buddhism, Sanskrit, Zoroastrianism, and Manu, extended the maps and chronologies through which Europeans conceived the past. Historical inquiry could treat Muhammad as a figure who had affected Europe rather than simply as a religious enemy; broader forms of human association could also challenge the image of Christian Europe as a community permanently besieged by outsiders. At the same time, proliferating categories of race, color, origin, temperament, and character increasingly organized human difference.

The 1798 Invasion and the Modern Field

The book marks Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 as the defining political and intellectual encounter of the period. It calls the expedition a model of one culture’s apparently scientific appropriation of another. The occupation set in motion processes between East and West that the author sees as continuing to shape modern cultural and political perspectives. Egypt, and subsequently other Islamic lands, became a live province and laboratory for Western knowledge of the Orient: a place where scholarship and effective power could meet.

The expedition’s lasting scholarly monument was Description de l'Égypte. Its scale gave the invasion a collective scholarly aspect, while also fixing the association between European knowledge and the power to observe, organize, and represent the occupied society. In the book’s account, the expedition did not simply add information about Egypt. It helped establish a scene for Orientalism in which the Orient could be treated as an available object of study and Western knowledge as an instrument with political consequences.

A Secular and Institutional Transformation

The eighteenth-century changes prepared Orientalism to become a modern, secular field. The extension of geographical and historical inquiry weakened the limits of a biblical map and calendar; comparative history encouraged the study of cultures outside Judeo-Christian traditions; selective identification made non-European societies more available to European reflection; and finer systems of classification sorted human populations into increasingly elaborate types. These developments could open space for historical understanding, but the book stresses that they also rendered the Orient more comprehensible within European categories.

In this account, the period’s significance lies in that double movement. European inquiry became broader and, in some respects, more attentive to historical materials, yet its expansion coincided with commercial competition, political occupation, and a growing authority to define other peoples. The modern Orientalism that followed was therefore neither simply a continuation of medieval religious hostility nor a neutral accumulation of discoveries. It emerged from a transformed intellectual landscape in which study, classification, and imperial reach increasingly reinforced one another.