First World War

The First World War is a turning point in Edward Said’s history of Orientalism: it joined inherited claims about the Orient to the practical work of governing, surveying, and dividing territory. In Said’s account, the war did not simply interrupt an academic tradition. It brought its knowledge into closer alignment with imperial administration, made the Orient a privileged field of Western action, and drew scholarly experts into the machinery of policy. The resulting history is at once a history of European competition and a struggle over who could describe the region, determine its future, and make its peoples legible to power.

Imperial Plans and the Partition of Asiatic Turkey

The war sharpened Anglo-French rivalry in the territories of the weakening Ottoman Empire, even as the two powers agreed in principle on the eventual partition of Asiatic Turkey. Britain’s presence in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and its influence across the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Suez Canal, stood alongside France’s regional ambitions and its claim to protect Maronite, Chaldean, and Nestorian Christians. Their competition was not merely abstract: France promoted projects including a planned Syrian-Mesopotamian railway across territory that was more or less under British control.

Before and during the war, secret diplomacy sought first to divide the Near Orient into spheres of influence and then into mandated or occupied territories. French expansionist sentiment had gathered around partition schemes, and a striking press campaign for dividing Asiatic Turkey appeared in Paris in 1914. In Britain, committees studied and recommended policy, including the Bunsen Committee. The joint Anglo-French planning associated with Mark Sykes and Georges Picot aimed to arrange geographical space while also easing rivalry between the powers. Sykes’s memorandum treated a future Arab rising as a possibility the two governments needed to prepare for together, lest it become a curse rather than a benefit. The planning thus framed local political action in advance as a problem for imperial coordination.

Knowledge Put to Work

For Said, the war brought latent Orientalist doctrines and the experience of administering the modern Orient into an unusually dramatic convergence. Western territorial acquisition made descriptions of the present increasingly urgent, while the archive supplied concepts through which officials interpreted what they encountered. Said points to Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer: ideas about the Oriental acquired from traditional Orientalist learning seemed, in his rule over millions of people, to be confirmed by the very administrative circumstances that gave those ideas political force. The same convergence appeared in French colonial experience in Syria, North Africa, and elsewhere.

The wartime surveying of Asiatic Turkey made the relationship especially visible. Said compares the region to the Sick Man of Europe laid out for surgery: its weakness, characteristics, and topographical outline presented for the purposes of dismemberment. Orientalist expertise was important to that process. Such knowledge could join the work of description to the practical operations of imperial planning, with the expert helping define the region that governments were preparing to divide.

That instrumental role had precedents in the imperial use of regional specialists. In 1882, the British scholar Edward Henry Palmer was sent to Sinai to assess opposition to British rule and whether it might be enlisted in support of the Arabi revolt; he was killed while carrying out the mission. During the war, D. G. Hogarth, whose book was titled The Penetration of Arabia, became head of the Arab Bureau in Cairo. These examples show why Said distinguishes the scholar’s authority from a supposedly detached academic position: expertise could also function as intelligence and administration, and could place its holder inside the political enterprise it described.

Agents, Narrative, and the Limits of Imperial Vision

Said sets the imperial agent against the bureaucratic institution of Orientalist scholarship. He draws on Hannah Arendt’s observation that the imperial agent is the counterpart of bureaucracy: if Orientalism organized knowledge through a conservative vision of an unchanging Orient, agents such as T. E. Lawrence served that vision on the ground. In Lawrence’s account of his own work, the ambition to stimulate political movement and offer a basis for national aspirations coexists with a hierarchy that places the value of the subject provinces below that of a single English life. The passage also imagines a future commonwealth in which different peoples stand together, but its language retains the distinction between dominant and subject races.

This tension gives Lawrence’s role its significance in Said’s analysis. Imperial policy sought to set the Orient in motion, to shape that movement according to Western designs, and then to keep it within bounds. Said describes the drama as a sequence: an Orient represented as lifeless is urged into political action; that action is given a Western form; and the agent’s retrospective account registers failure and betrayal. The narrative of intervention therefore cannot be reduced to a simple account of liberation or control. Its contradictions reveal how imperial projects could encourage political agency while reserving for Western actors the authority to define its proper direction.

The agent’s work also exposes a conflict between static vision and historical narrative. Orientalist vision treated the Orient as stable and eternally unchanged; narrative, by contrast, makes movement and historical change visible. For Said, the war brought the Orient into history through the activity of agents, but this entry into political life did not mean that imperial powers would accept an independent course for it. The prevailing view continued to deny Orientals a tradition of freedom. Political mobilization could be welcomed as a force to be directed, but not necessarily recognized as self-determination.

The Enduring Imperial Framework

Said situates the war within a much wider history of colonial expansion. The late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century institutions and intellectual practices he studies belong to the first phase of what he calls the greatest age of territorial acquisition; by the end of the war, Europe had colonized 85 percent of the earth. Modern Orientalism, in this account, was not only an intellectual or theoretical enterprise. Its systematic accumulation of knowledge tended toward the accumulation of people and territory, and the reconstruction of languages and histories could prepare the way for what armies, administrations, and bureaucracies later carried out on the ground.

The scale of imperial scholarship is visible in Said’s comparison of Napoleon’s Description de l’Égypte with the three-volume account of the French invasion written by Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti from the perspective of the invaded. The Description presented itself with the authority of systematic scientific labor, supported by an army of conquest; Jabarti’s chronicle recorded the experience of someone who paid the price of that invasion. Said notes that Napoleon’s account was objective from the standpoint of a powerful state seeking to hold Egypt within the French imperial orbit. Read together, the two bodies of writing are not inert evidence of an eternal East–West conflict but parts of a specific historical encounter shaped by unequal power and unequal access to authority.

The war also forms part of the history of expanding American involvement. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American missionary institutions—including presses, schools, universities, and hospitals—contributed to regional welfare, but Said argues that their imperial character and support from the United States government made them comparable in important respects to French and British institutions. During the First World War, American interest in Zionism and the colonization of Palestine played a role in bringing the United States into the war. British discussions before and after the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, Said observes, reflected the seriousness with which that declaration was treated in the United States.

Said’s account therefore makes the First World War a hinge between Orientalist scholarship and the political ordering of the modern Middle East. Its territorial plans, expert agents, and administrative practices show how claims to knowledge could acquire material force. But the essay also insists that imperial archives do not exhaust the history they seek to describe: the contrast between the Description and Jabarti’s account, like the war’s unresolved tension between mobilization and control, makes visible the competing positions from which the past is recorded and the future claimed.