Area studies

Area studies names a postwar American reorganization of knowledge about the non-Western world: the region became an administrative and policy problem, and the scholar was recast as an expert whose claims could serve government or business. Edward Said presents this shift not as the disappearance of Orientalism but as its adaptation. European philological institutions and accumulated knowledge gave way to social-science specialties, policy networks, and new forms of expertise, while inherited assumptions of cultural difference and hostility persisted.

From European Orientalism to American Expertise

After World War II, France and Britain lost their former centrality in world politics as American power expanded. The Arab and Muslim figure accordingly received new attention in popular culture, academia, policy planning, and business. A wide web of interests linked the formerly colonized world to the United States, while proliferating subspecialties divided and recombined disciplines once organized around European philology. The area specialist claimed regional expertise and put it at the service of government, business, or both.

This was a change in institutional form as well as in international power. Knowledge accumulated in European Orientalism did not simply vanish: it was dissolved into new forms and circulated through hybrid representations. In Said’s account, the postwar American field inherited that older store of knowledge even as its organization became less recognizably philological. The shift therefore joined a new political center to a durable intellectual inheritance.

The Social-Science Turn

Morroe Berger illustrates the changed academic posture. Though a professional sociologist rather than a classical Orientalist, he remained indebted to Orientalist ideas, including an authorized downgrading of the material he studied. Said argues that such a learned perspective could reinforce caricatures already common in popular culture. Berger also exemplifies the broader transition: instead of first mastering the region’s esoteric languages as a philologist, the new specialist began as a trained social scientist and applied a general method to the region.

Said dates this specifically American contribution roughly to the period immediately after World War II, when the United States assumed a position Britain and France had recently occupied. Before then, American engagement with the Orient had included individual writers, theologians, missionaries, and occasional diplomatic or military encounters, but it lacked the deeply invested tradition of European Orientalism. In Said’s explanation, the American frontier’s westward direction also meant that the imaginative investment made in Europe was absent. After the war, the region appeared less as a broad cultural question than as an administrative one, and social scientists inherited the mantle of Orientalist expertise while retaining its cultural hostility.

The new expertise also changed what counted as relevant evidence. Said notes that extensive expert writing on the modern Near East could omit literature altogether. Regional specialists privileged facts, trends, attitudes, and statistics; literary works, with their accounts of particular lives and values, could disrupt generalized representations. Their exclusion helped reduce people to abstractions and left the region conceptually dehumanized. Language study did not disappear, but in this order it became chiefly a tool for strategic or administrative aims rather than a means of reading literary texts. It could also lend the specialist an aura of firsthand authority over material presented as obscure.

Institutions, Funding, and Strategic Use

The institutional apparatus grew from an explicitly strategic concern. Mortimer Graves described a cultural-relations policy that sought to acquire every significant publication in important Near Eastern languages since 1900, and argued that Congress should recognize this effort as a national-security measure. The stated concern was to understand forces competing with American ideas for acceptance in the Near East, especially communism and Islam. Said locates the institutional model in the Middle East Institute, founded in Washington in May 1946 under federal auspices, and emphasizes its relationship to public security and policy rather than an ideal of scholarship isolated from political purpose.

From such organizations developed a much larger research network. It included the Middle East Studies Association, support from the Ford and other foundations, federal programs supporting universities, government research projects, work by the Defense Department, the RAND Corporation, and the Hudson Institute, as well as consultative and lobbying efforts by banks, oil companies, and multinational corporations. Said argues that the network retained the traditional Orientalist outlook across both its general activities and its specialized work. Its sophisticated appearance and social-science methods did not, in themselves, dissolve the intellectual inheritance it carried.

Continuities and Consequences

For Said, the parallel between European and American imperial designs is clear, but the transmission of scholarly tradition requires closer attention. European Orientalism was accommodated, normalized, domesticated, and popularized within the postwar efflorescence of Near Eastern studies in the United States. A coherent attitude consequently appeared across scholars, institutions, styles of discourse, and approaches, even when the work presented itself as refined or technically sophisticated. Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb’s influence at Harvard sharpened this connection: in the mid-1950s he became director of the university’s Center for Middle East Studies, and Said contrasts his close engagement with public policy and Cold War area studies with the scholarly stimulus associated with Philip Hitti’s Princeton presence.

The result was not simply a new label for an old discipline. Area studies relocated authority from mastery of classical languages and texts toward policy-facing expertise, while bringing universities, federal agencies, foundations, research institutes, and commercial interests into a shared field of knowledge production. Its importance in Said’s argument lies in this combination of institutional change and intellectual continuity: the United States reshaped Orientalist practice for its postwar ascendancy, but the new professional form continued to organize the region through inherited assumptions about cultural difference and Western authority.