American Oriental Society

The American Oriental Society was founded in 1842 as an institution for studying the Orient, but its significance in Edward Said’s account lies in the political purposes that shaped American Oriental studies from the outset. At its first annual meeting in 1843, president John Pickering presented the study of the Orient as a national undertaking enabled by new conditions of access and communication and modeled on the work of imperial European powers. The Society’s scholarly program—publishing texts and translations, collecting materials, and cultivating expertise—thus belonged to a wider history in which producing knowledge about other peoples was intertwined with the ambition to reach, interpret, and influence them.

Foundation and Program

The Society’s first annual meeting took place amid circumstances Pickering described as unusually favorable to Oriental study: peace in Europe, freer access to Oriental countries, and improved communication. He pointed to the Treaty of Nanking’s opening of Chinese ports, the adoption of the screw propeller in oceangoing vessels, and the telegraph work of Samuel Morse, who had already proposed a transatlantic cable. These developments formed more than a backdrop to scholarship. In Said’s reading, they signaled the expanding practical reach that made the collection and circulation of knowledge possible.

Pickering set out an ambitious field of work: to cultivate learning in Asian, African, and Polynesian languages and in matters concerning the Orient; to create interest in Oriental studies in the United States; to publish texts, translations, and communications; and to assemble a library and cabinet. The Society’s work concentrated especially on Asia, with Sanskrit and the Semitic languages receiving particular attention. Its stated activities therefore combined research, publication, public education, and the accumulation of materials in a single institutional program.

Scholarship and Imperial Context

Said places the Society within a nineteenth-century pattern in which Oriental studies grew alongside European imperial power. He argues that Pickering’s appeal to the examples of European powers makes the political frame of the American project explicit: Oriental studies were not simply an apolitical scholarly pursuit. The historical conditions Pickering welcomed—the opening of ports, faster ocean travel, and new communications—also facilitated Euro-American access and expansion. The institution’s cultivation of languages and texts consequently took place within a wider field of unequal relations between the West and the societies it studied.

The Society also forms part of Said’s account of Orientalism as an organized system for acquiring materials and disseminating specialized knowledge. Across Europe and the United States, learned societies, professorships, and periodicals multiplied the authority and reach of the field. In that institutional setting, collecting texts and building libraries were not neutral acts of accumulation alone: they helped make the Orient available as an object of study through Western systems of selection, classification, publication, and interpretation. The American Society’s library and cabinet belong to this broader institutional history, though the evidence does not specify the contents of its collections beyond its general collecting program.

From the Society to American Middle East Studies

Said connects the Society’s nineteenth-century foundation to the later development of American interest in the Middle East, while distinguishing the earlier scholarly institution from the much larger postwar research apparatus. During and after the Second World War, American interest in the region expanded markedly. In 1950, Mortimer Graves described a cultural-relations policy that sought to acquire every significant publication in important Near Eastern languages issued since 1900, presenting the effort as a matter of national security and as a way to understand forces competing with American influence. Said identifies this strategic orientation as a contemporary extension of a longer institutional tradition, not as a simple continuation of the Society’s original structure.

The Middle East Institute, founded in Washington in May 1946 under federal auspices, became a model for a broader network that included the Middle East Studies Association, foundation support, federal university programs and research projects, defense research, the RAND Corporation, the Hudson Institute, and consultation and lobbying by banks, oil companies, and multinational businesses. Said’s account places this network in the tradition of European Orientalist scholarship: an intellectual inheritance adapted, normalized, and popularized in the United States, where sophisticated social-science methods could coexist with enduring assumptions about the region. The American Oriental Society is significant in this genealogy as an early institution that helped establish the national cultivation of Oriental studies, rather than as the sole cause or organizational center of later policy research.

Critical Significance

The Society’s history helps Said challenge the separation of scholarship from power. Pickering’s stated aims included genuine scholarly activities—language study, publication, translation, and collecting—but the context of the founding also linked those aims to imperial precedents and expanding access. The point is not that every scholarly effort was reducible to political strategy; it is that the field’s institutions developed within historical relations that shaped what could be collected, studied, and made authoritative.

That distinction matters to Said’s broader argument about Orientalism. Knowledge about other societies may arise from careful study and a desire for understanding, yet it may also serve a project of self-affirmation and control. The Society’s early program stands at the beginning of an American institutional history in which the production of expertise about the Orient became connected to cultural policy, national security, and public affairs. Its enduring significance in the book is therefore not merely that it sponsored scholarship, but that its foundation reveals how the American study of the Orient was already entangled with the political world that made such study possible.