In Edward Said’s account, World War II is a hinge in the modern history of Orientalism, not simply a chronological boundary. It ends the era in which Britain and France dominated the Orient and is followed by American ascendancy, as wartime campaigns and competition over oil, strategic position, and human resources helped prepare the United States for a new imperial role. The transition was political and institutional as well as scholarly: European Orientalist traditions were accommodated and extended through American policy, research, and area studies.

A turning point in imperial predominance

From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II, Britain and France dominated the Orient and Orientalism. Said describes that influence as a cultural enterprise as well as a political one, encompassing scholarship, literary representation, colonial administration, military power, trade, and the production of specialist knowledge. World War II marks the end of this period of Franco-British dominance. After the war, the United States took the leading position and approached the Orient in ways that echoed the earlier British and French relationship.

The shift did not mean that the European intellectual inheritance simply vanished. Said argues instead that the tradition was taken up, normalized, adapted, and made widely available in the postwar United States. American Orientalism therefore emerged not as an entirely new formation, but as a successor that inherited established ways of representing the Orient while attaching them to a changed balance of power.

Wartime conditions and American interest

During and after World War II, American interest in the Middle East escalated markedly. Cairo, Teheran, and North Africa were important arenas of war. In this setting, the exploitation of oil, strategic, and human resources—an undertaking pioneered by Britain and France—helped prepare the United States to assume a postwar imperial role. The war thus connected military geography and resource interests to the later expansion of American scholarship and policy engagement.

Said places this development within a longer history of Western involvement rather than treating it as a sudden postwar discovery. The region had already become important through the projects and rivalries of European powers; the wartime setting accelerated the United States’ entry into that field. The result was a transfer of predominance in which the older imperial relationship persisted under a new leading power.

From cultural policy to research institutions

A central part of the American role was a cultural relations policy. In 1950, Mortimer Graves described an effort to acquire every significant publication in important Near Eastern languages since 1900, presenting the project as a matter of national security. Graves framed the need for greater American understanding around forces competing with the American idea for acceptance in the Near East, especially communism and Islam. In Said’s account, the language of scholarship and cultural understanding was therefore closely connected to strategic policy.

The Middle East Institute, founded in Washington in May 1946 under federal auspices, embodied this connection. Said identifies it as a model whose orientation was frankly strategic and responsive to public security and policy, rather than simply the pursuit of pure scholarship. The institutional network that developed around this postwar approach included 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 by banks, oil companies, and multinational corporations.

These organizations made the postwar transition durable. Research on the Middle East became connected to governmental programs, security priorities, economic interests, and public-policy advice. Said’s argument is not that every scholarly undertaking was identical, but that the institutional framework retained much of the traditional Orientalist outlook even as it presented itself in contemporary forms.

Area studies and the policy-oriented expert

The postwar development of area-studies programs and institutes also changed the position of Oriental scholarship within universities. Said notes that the academic study of the Orient increasingly became a branch of national policy. The region was approached both for its strategic and economic importance and through inherited ideas of exotic difference. In the electronic age it appeared more immediately accessible to Western citizens, yet it was also more closely crossed by Western, especially American, interests.

H. A. R. Gibb illustrates one route by which this scholarly tradition entered the American institutional setting. In the middle 1950s he became director of Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies. Said distinguishes his influence from that of Philip Hitti at Princeton: Princeton’s department had produced important scholars and stimulated scholarly interest, while Gibb was more directly connected with the public-policy dimension of Orientalism. His position at Harvard helped focus the field on a Cold War area-studies approach.

This institutional setting made expertise available for policy work. Elsewhere in his discussion, Said describes modern area experts as increasingly difficult to distinguish from advisers working within the policy sciences. The alliance between specialists in national-character analysis and experts in Islamic institutions could be used for military and national-security purposes. Strategies such as the stick-and-carrot technique and the Alliance for Progress drew on inherited claims about the Orient, recasting them as instruments for managing political relationships.

The war’s wider historical frame

World War II also belongs to a broader sequence in Said’s account of imperial intervention and its aftermath. He places the war between earlier European domination and the postwar American ascendancy, while tracing the effects of imperial power through subsequent struggles over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. Alongside that history, he sets the rise of anticolonial nationalism, periods of liberal independence, military coups, insurgency, civil war, and later forms of political conflict. Each phase, he argues, generates its own reductive accounts of other peoples.

The war’s significance, then, is not that it resolves the history of Orientalism, but that it reorganizes its political center. The end of British and French predominance accompanies the growth of American institutions and policy expertise, while the underlying relationship between knowledge and power continues. In Said’s analysis, World War II marks a change of imperial leadership and of scholarly apparatus, even as older representational habits persist within the new order.