Chapter 1 - Styles of Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century

Summary

Orientalism was, and in modified ways continues to be, a capacious, supple and changing discursive system that enables Anglo-European writers to explain and to manage the encounters between themselves and the peoples of lands ranging from Turkey, Egypt, Persia, and India to China and Japan. Since these peoples, their lives, their manufactures and their world-views were so different from each other (as in fact were the different westerners who engaged them), we must begin by recognizing that Orientalism is a discourse of singular power, one that manufactures an “Orient” even as it brings different peoples into view.