American imperial ascendancy

American imperial ascendancy is the postwar displacement of British and French predominance by the United States, accompanied by a transformation in how knowledge about the Middle East was produced and used. In Edward Said’s account, Orientalism did not disappear with the older European empires: it was adapted into American area studies, social-science expertise, and policy institutions. The shift changed the institutional language of imperial power while carrying forward its unequal assumptions about the peoples it claimed to explain.

Transfer of Imperial Authority

The transition followed a long history of European involvement and American expansion of interest. American missionary institutions in the Near East—including presses, schools, universities, and hospitals—could contribute to local well-being, but Said places them within a wider imperial framework, supported by the United States government and comparable in their imperial character to French and British institutions. American engagement was thus not born solely in the postwar period, even though its scale and strategic position changed markedly afterward.

During the First World War, American interest in Zionism and the colonization of Palestine was already consequential in discussions surrounding the Balfour Declaration. During and after the Second World War, that interest escalated. Cairo, Teheran, and North Africa became important arenas of war, while the exploitation of oil, strategic position, and human resources—pioneered by Britain and France—formed part of the setting in which the United States prepared to assume a new imperial role. After the war, France and Britain no longer occupied the center of world politics: American power had displaced them, and a broad network of interests linked former colonial territories to the United States.

This was both a geopolitical succession and a change in the organization of knowledge. European Orientalism had developed over generations through philology and scholarship; its accumulated learning did not simply vanish. Said describes it as being dissolved and released into new forms, including academic subspecialties and hybrid representations that circulated through American culture. The new structures divided knowledge into specialized fields even as they connected those fields to the political, commercial, and strategic interests of the United States.

From Philology to Policy Expertise

The institutional change was especially visible in the transformation of Orientalism from a discipline grounded in the study of languages into a social-science specialty. Morroe Berger exemplifies the new academic attitude: Said treats his work not as classical Orientalism but as evidence that its inherited ideas could persist within professional sociology. The American specialist no longer necessarily began by mastering the region’s languages; instead, a trained social scientist applied a method to the Orient as to another administrative object. Cultural hostility remained, while the claim to expertise took on a new professional form.

Said dates this development roughly to the period after the Second World War, when the United States occupied a position recently vacated by Britain and France. Before that moment, American encounters with the Orient had been comparatively limited and scattered: they included literary visitors, Transcendentalist interest in Indian thought, biblical-language study, diplomatic and military episodes, and missionary activity. In Said’s interpretation, there had been no deeply invested American tradition comparable to European Orientalism, and no equivalent sequence of philological processes that refined and reconstructed knowledge of the region. The American frontier had instead been imagined primarily as a westward one. Once the postwar Orient became an administrative matter and a question of policy, the social scientist and regional expert inherited the mantle of Orientalism and altered its appearance without abandoning its antagonisms.

That reorientation also affected what counted as relevant knowledge. Said observes that extensive expert writing on the modern Near East could pass over literature entirely. In place of literary accounts of lived experience, values, and humanity, the regional expert’s preferred material was often data framed as facts, attitudes, trends, or statistics. The omission, in Said’s analysis, helped reduce people to abstractions and made it easier for established images to stand in for a complex social world. Literary writing could interrupt that pattern by bringing living experience into view, but it was precisely the kind of evidence that this specialist approach tended to neglect.

Institutions and Strategic Knowledge

The postwar apparatus of American Middle Eastern research grew from an explicitly strategic conception of cultural knowledge. In 1950, Mortimer Graves described a cultural-relations policy that sought to acquire every significant publication in major Near Eastern languages since 1900. He argued that Congress should recognize this undertaking as a matter of national security, because the United States needed a better understanding of forces competing with the American idea for acceptance in the region—especially communism and Islam. The collecting and study of publications were therefore linked not only to scholarship but to an assessment of political influence.

The Middle East Institute, founded in Washington in May 1946, became an important model for the expanding research structure. Said characterizes its orientation as strategic and sensitive to public security and policy, rather than simply the pursuit of scholarship for its own sake. The institutional network widened to include the Middle East Studies Association, foundation support, federal university programs and research projects, work by the Defense Department, the RAND Corporation, and the Hudson Institute, as well as consultation and lobbying connected with banks, oil companies, and multinational businesses. In Said’s account, the scale and variety of these organizations did not make their general outlook independent of European Orientalism; the inherited perspective remained embedded in the newer system.

The conversion of European scholarship into an American framework was not a simple handover. Said stresses the extent to which the European tradition was accommodated, normalized, domesticated, and popularized within the postwar growth of Near Eastern studies. Sophisticated social-science methods and the appearance of a refined academic style could coexist with a coherent orientation shared across institutions, scholars, and forms of discourse. American imperial ascendancy thus depended not only on political and economic reach, but also on the institutional migration and adaptation of an older body of knowledge.

Scholars and the New Area-Studies Frame

The differing positions of Philip Hitti and H. A. R. Gibb illustrate the changing relation between scholarship and policy. Hitti’s presence at Princeton from the late 1920s helped produce a substantial group of scholars and stimulated academic interest in Oriental studies. Gibb’s later position, especially as director of the Harvard Center for Middle East Studies in the mid-1950s, more directly connected Orientalism with public policy. Said contrasts the Princeton department’s scholarly influence with Gibb’s role in focusing the field on a Cold War area-studies approach.

Gibb did not overtly adopt the language of cultural discourse associated with earlier Orientalists, but Said argues that its intellectual apparatus and assumptions continued to operate elsewhere. Gustave von Grunebaum, who came to the United States among European intellectuals fleeing fascism, developed an influential body of work at Chicago and later UCLA. His studies treated Islam as a unified culture and, in Said’s reading, repeatedly generalized about it in reductive and negative terms. The example shows how an older Orientalist outlook could persist through the authority of a European-trained scholar working in American universities, even as the field took on new institutional forms.

Together, these cases distinguish several strands of the postwar transformation. American area studies expanded the study of the region and created new scholarly communities, yet its policy connections and inherited assumptions shaped what questions could be asked and what forms of evidence carried authority. Expertise did not merely describe a pre-existing object: it organized the Orient into a legible region for research, administration, and strategy. The claim to specialist knowledge could therefore sustain older relations of power while presenting them in the vocabulary of modern social science.

Critique, Humanism, and Historical Consequences

Said’s critique connects postwar American expertise to a longer history in which representation and imperial power reinforce one another. His analysis of Gustave Flaubert’s encounter with Kuchuk Hanem, an Egyptian dancer and courtesan, makes the asymmetry concrete: Flaubert could speak for her and present her to readers as representative, while she did not speak for herself in his account. Said treats their unequal positions not as an isolated personal encounter but as an example of the wider power imbalance that enabled Western discourse about the East. The episode clarifies a broader consequence of imperial knowledge: those represented can be denied authority over the meaning assigned to their own lives.

That pattern, Said argues, has material as well as intellectual force. His account of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt contrasts the imposing, state-backed Description de l’Égypte with Abdal-Rahman al-Jabarti’s three-volume account from the standpoint of the invaded. The monumental scientific description possessed the institutional weight of a modern army and a corps of scholars; al-Jabarti’s chronicle recorded the invasion from the position of someone who paid its price. Read together, the accounts are not merely opposing documents but evidence of a historical encounter shaped by unequal power. The contrast also warns against treating the imperial account as neutral simply because it speaks in the name of science.

Said extends this historical argument into modern conflicts and the continuing legacy of empire. He rejects the claim that recalling imperial depredations excuses present failures, arguing instead that such a claim understates the distortion imposed across generations on Palestinians, Congolese, Algerians, and Iraqis. He juxtaposes the acknowledged transformation in consciousness brought by the Holocaust with the insufficient recognition given to imperialism’s lasting effects and to the continuing work of Orientalist representation. The history he traces runs from Napoleon and the rise of Oriental studies through colonial rule and later struggles over oil and strategic control, alongside anticolonial nationalism, periods of independence, coups, insurgency, civil war, and political brutality. Each phase produces its own reductive images and polemics.

Said’s alternative is not a claim that there is a single, authentic Orient waiting to be recovered. He explicitly rejects the idea of a real Orient as the basis for his argument, while affirming the capacity of the region’s peoples to struggle over their own futures. Nor does his criticism deny injustice or suffering. It calls for those issues to be situated in history, culture, and socioeconomic reality rather than made into abstractions that close discussion. In his account, American imperial ascendancy is consequential because it carries older structures of representation into a new era of policy and expertise; the response is to widen the field of understanding, restore historical complexity, and pursue coexistence rather than domination.