Treaty of Nanking

The Treaty of Nanking is cited by Edward Said as a marker of the expanding access to Asian territories that accompanied nineteenth-century Oriental studies. In Said’s account, the treaty’s opening of Chinese ports belongs to a wider imperial constellation: political arrangements and new means of transport and communication made the Orient more accessible to European and American powers, while scholarly institutions organized knowledge about it.

Place in the founding of American Oriental studies

At the American Oriental Society’s first annual meeting in 1843, its president, John Pickering, presented the period as especially favorable for cultivating the study of the Orient. He pointed to peace, freer access to Oriental countries, and improved communication. The Treaty of Nanking figured among these conditions because it had opened Chinese ports; it appeared in the same inventory as the adoption of the screw-propeller in oceangoing vessels and Morse’s completed telegraph, along with his proposal for a trans-Atlantic cable.

The Society’s stated aims were to cultivate learning in Asiatic, African, and Polynesian languages and in matters concerning the Orient; to foster interest in Oriental studies in the United States; to publish texts, translations, and communications; and to build a library and collection. Most of its work, Said notes, took place in Asian studies, particularly Sanskrit and Semitic languages. The treaty thus enters the account not as an academic text or an isolated diplomatic detail, but as part of the material setting in which such scholarly work was proposed and pursued.

Access, infrastructure, and imperial power

Said reads the treaty alongside Metternich, Louis-Philippe, steamship technology, and the telegraph. Taken together, these references make the apparent quiet and technical progress of the period look less like a neutral backdrop than an enabling structure for Euro-American access to the Orient. The Treaty of Nanking’s opening of Chinese ports is the clearest political example in Pickering’s list: access was being altered by treaty as well as facilitated by new technologies.

This context sharpens Said’s distinction between studying other peoples for understanding and studying them as part of a campaign of self-affirmation, control, and dominion. Oriental studies, he argues, had a political framework, not simply a scholarly one. The treaty is one concrete element in that framework, connecting the expansion of access to Asia with the institutional production of knowledge about the regions newly made more available to Western observers.

Significance in Said’s argument

The Treaty of Nanking helps Said show how Orientalism depended on more than ideas or representations alone. It developed amid changing access, imperial ambitions, and institutions that collected, translated, and classified knowledge. The treaty’s appearance in a speech about the promising circumstances for scholarship exposes the proximity between the growth of academic study and the geopolitical conditions that enabled Western penetration.

Said does not treat the treaty as the sole cause of American Oriental studies or as proof that every scholar’s work was reducible to imperial policy. Rather, its place in Pickering’s account lets the reader see how the Society’s scholarly program was framed by a world of opened ports, faster travel, and emerging communications. Its significance lies in this relation: diplomatic access and intellectual activity could be presented together as signs of progress, even as Said identifies their place in a history of power over the Orient.