Social Sciences Research Committee

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is presented as part of the institutional network that expanded U.S. research on the Middle East after the Second World War. In Edward Said’s account, its links between social science and area studies helped channel scholarship toward government and policy needs, carrying forward an Orientalist framework in a new American setting.

Institutional Role in Postwar Research

Said situates the SSRC within a much larger growth of American interest in the Middle East during and after the Second World War. The region’s wartime importance, together with the strategic and economic resources previously exploited by Britain and France, formed part of the context in which the United States prepared for a postwar imperial role. In this setting, research institutions and university programs were not simply detached scholarly ventures: they developed alongside expanding national interest in the region.

The institutional system included the Middle East Institute, founded in Washington in May 1946 under federal auspices, as well as the Middle East Studies Association, foundation-supported university programs, federal research initiatives, and research carried out by organizations including the United States Department of Defense, the RAND Corporation, and the Hudson Institute. Said names the SSRC in this network as a body connected to Middle Eastern studies, showing how disciplinary research and organized regional expertise were linked to institutions with policy and strategic concerns.

Links Between Social Science and Area Studies

The SSRC’s significance in this account lies especially in its connection with the reorganization of scholarship into area studies. Postwar American study of the Middle East developed through specialized programs and research projects, while regional experts increasingly claimed forms of knowledge applicable to government or business. The SSRC’s links to Middle Eastern studies thus belonged to a wider institutional pattern that joined academic specialization to practical uses of regional knowledge.

Said contrasts this postwar arrangement with the older European organization of Orientalism. European scholarship had accumulated knowledge through its own institutions, specialties, and systems of dissemination; in the United States, that tradition was not simply copied intact but accommodated, normalized, domesticated, and popularized through the growth of Near Eastern studies. The SSRC’s place in the institutional network helps illustrate how this transition could occur through academic and research structures rather than through a direct transfer of a single doctrine.

Government Support and Policy Context

The policy setting becomes explicit in Said’s discussion of university programs supported by government and private foundations. He identifies the National Defense Education Act of 1958, described as an initiative inspired directly by Sputnik, and the establishment of links between the SSRC and Middle Eastern studies as parts of this support structure. These connections placed area research within a landscape where national priorities and academic development intersected.

Said does not treat the existence of such links as proof that every scholarly project served a government purpose. His broader point is that the research apparatus retained, in much of its general and detailed functioning, an outlook continuous with the European Orientalist tradition. The SSRC therefore figures not as an isolated policymaking body, but as one component in a system through which specialized knowledge, university research, public support, and strategic interest could reinforce one another.

Significance in Said’s Argument

The SSRC’s role helps make visible the institutional means by which Orientalism persisted as American influence displaced Britain and France from the center of world politics. The old European scholarly inheritance entered a new configuration of federal programs, foundations, research organizations, and university specialties. Within that configuration, knowledge of the Middle East could be produced as academic expertise while remaining connected to the practical interests of government and business.

Said’s account consequently treats the SSRC as evidence of a structural continuity, not as the sole cause or author of American Orientalism. Its importance comes from its position among the organizations and programs that connected social-science research to the expanding field of Middle Eastern studies. That position supports his larger argument that inherited ways of representing and studying the region could endure even as institutions, sponsors, and political centers changed.