The Motives for British

Colonization
Religious Freedom, Economic
Opportunity
 Puritans
• Compromise was satisfactory to
most people in England, but there
were DISSENTERS: faithful
CATHOLICS and reformers known
as PURITANS, who had been
exposed to Calvinist ideas while in
exile and could not accept the
remnants of Catholicism.
Dissenters represented a threat to
unity and were severely
PERSECUTED. Many sought refuge
in the New World
 Economic Developments
• The TRANSITION from an
agriculturally-based feudal
economy to a diversified
(agriculture, industry,
commerce) capitalist
economy created
opportunities for many, but it
also created economic
hardship.
 Money-Based Economy
• As a MONEY-BASED ECONOMY
became more important, the
feudal structure started to break
down.
– Lords, eager to increase their
resources, allowed their vassals to
pay fees in lieu of performing
military services.
– Peasants were allowed to buy their
freedom and engage in
independent enterprises.
– The importance of agriculture
declined.
 The Enclosure Movement
• As the MIDDLE CLASS grew in
importance, wool (used in the
production of fine clothing)
became increasingly valuable.
Many lords converted their lands
from agriculture to sheep raising.
This development, known as the
ENCLOSURE MOVEMENT, meant
that serfs were thrown off the
land.
 Cloth-Making
• WOOL became an important
industry and one of England’s
most valuable exports. In
addition to sheep-raising, many
entrepreneurs went into the
cloth making business. This
industry created jobs for many
peasants, but it was highly
competitive and entrepreneurs
who were forced out of business
left large numbers of
unemployed workers.
 Foreign Commerce
• The wool industry stimulated
FOREIGN COMMERCE.
Entrepreneurs began to carry
exports in English-owned
ships. However, foreign trade
was an extremely risky
business and many lost their
fortunes attempting to enter
the field.
 Opportunities in New World
• Many Englishmen were motivated to
seek greater OPPORTUNITIES in the New
World:
– Second sons of noblemen (excluded
from an inheritance by the law of
primogeniture) sought to make their
fortunes in the New World.
– Members of the middle class
(merchants, shopkeepers, doctors,
lawyers) hoped there would be less
competition in the New World.
– Peasants thrown off the land or left
unemployed by the wool industry sought
a way to make a living in the New World.
9
 Orientalism
• EDWARD SAID 1977
ORIENTALISM AS DISCOURSE
ORIENTALISM AS DISCIPLINE

* Main Themes of Orientalism

Exotic east
EAST IS EAST AND
WEST IS WEST
The Twins Shall Never Meet
White man’s
BURDEN/MISSION
10
• I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say
that an Englishman in India, or Egypt, in the
later nineteenth century, took an interest in
those countries, which was never far from their
status, in his mind, as British colonies. To say
this may seem quite different from saying that
all academic knowledge about India and Egypt
is somehow tinged and impressed with,
violated by, the gross political fact—and
yet that is what I am saying in this study of
Orientalism.
• — Introduction, Orientalism,
11
• The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a
system of representations framed by a whole set
of forces that brought the Orient into Western
learning, Western consciousness, and later,
Western empire. […] The Orient is the stage on
which the whole East is confined. On this stage
will appear the figures whose role it is to
represent the larger whole from which they
emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an
unlimited extension beyond the familiar
European world, but rather a closed field, a
theatrical stage affixed to Europe.
12
• Said defines ‘Orientalism’ as “Western style for dominating,
restructuring having authority over orient” (3). The term
‘Orientalism’ which refers to the historical and ideological process
whereby false images of and the myths about the Eastern or the
“orient” world have been constructed in various Western
discourses, including that of
• imaginative literature. Orientalism which is based on the cultural
superiority of the West over the East paved the way for
imperialism.
• Edward Said looked about the divisive relationship of the colonizer
and the colonized. Ania Loomba rightly says, “Said argues that the
representation of the orient in European literary texts, travelogues
and other writings contributed to the creation of a dichotomy
between Europe and its ‘others’(44). Said’s project is to show how
knowledge about the non- Europens was a part of the process of
dominating them. Western attitude towards Orientalists is based
on ignorance of the Eastern culture and literature.
13
• The colonizers imposed their culture, and literature on the colonized
people through various means. Said tries to show that West was wrong
to treat the East as inferior both culturally and intellectually. Said
argues that Western views of the Orient are not based on what is
observed to exist in Oriental lands but often results from the West’s
dream, fantasies and assumptions about what this radically different
place contains.
• The West has misrepresented ‘the Orient’ as mystic place of exoticism,
moral laxity, sexual degeneracy and so forth. Orientalism constructs
binary division. The Orient is frequently described in a series of
negative terms. Leela Gandhi states “Orientalism is the first book in
which Said relentlessly unmasks the ideological disguises of
imperialism”(67). Said’s “Orientalism can be said to inaugurate a new
kind of study of colonialism” (Loomba 44). He wants to do away the
binary opposition between the West and the East so that one can not
claim the superiority over the other. Said’s Culture and Imperialism
(1993) continues and extends the work began in Orientalism by
documenting the imperial complicities of some major works of the
Western literary canon. 14
Orientalism was such a controversial essay that it was able to impact many
different thought genres after the first couple years of its publication.

• Orientalism exercises power and has authority

over the Orient

• Orientalism produces and manages the Orient

15
• The Orient was almost a European invention,
and had been since antiquity a place of
romance, exotic beings, haunting memories
and landscapes, remarkable experiences.
• the main thing for the European visitor was a
European representation of the Orient and its
contemporary fate

16
 the Other
• the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)
as its contrasting image, idea, personality,
experience.

• Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative.

• the vastly expanded American political and economic

role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great
claims on our understanding of that Orient.

17
 the methodological problems
• academic
• imaginative meanings
• historically and materially

Foucault's notion of a discourse

because of Orientalism
the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of
thought or action.

18
 Orientalism derives from …
• British and French cultural enter-prises

• From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end

of World War II France and Britain dominated the Orient and
Orientalism

• since World War II America has dominated the Orient

• it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of

the Occident (British, French, or American)

19
 reasonable qualifications
• it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was
essentially an idea, or a creation with no
corresponding reality.
• ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be
understood or studied without their force, or more
precisely their configurations of power
• One ought never to assume that the structure of
Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies
or of myths

20
 Orientalism,
• is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient,
but a created body of theory and practice in which,
there has been a considerable material invest-ment.

• The relationship between

Occident and Orient is
a relationship of
power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex
hegemony

21
 hegemony
• gives Orientalism the durability and the strength
that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe:
the idea of European identity as a superior one in
comparison with all the non-European peoples and
cultures.
• the imaginative examination of things Oriental was
based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign
Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged
centrality an Oriental world emerged

• "The Lustful Turk"

22
The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is
also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest
and oldest colonies,

the source of its civilizations and languages, its

cultural contestant,

and one of its deepest and most recurring

images of the Other.

23
 Orientalism,
designed to challenge the bias imbedded in the
Western consciousness

• The Orient was, for centuries, based upon an

intellectual construct that reinforced
conditions of inequality

24
The most readily accepted designation for
Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed
the label still serves in a number of academic
institutions.

25
• the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient-
dealing with it by making statements about it,
authorizing views of it,
describing it,
by teaching it,
settling it,
ruling over it:

• in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating,

restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

26
• Orientalism is
• not a mere political subject matter or field that is
reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or
institutions;
• nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about
the Orient;
• nor is it representative and expressive of some
nefarious "Western" imperialist plot to hold down
the "Oriental" world.

27
 Orientalism

• realizing-- political imperialism governs an

entire field of study, imagination, and
scholarly institutions

• a dynamic exchange
between individual authors and the large
political concerns shaped by the three great
empires

28
 principal methodological devices for
studying authority
• strategic location
• a way of describing the author's position in a text
with regard to the Oriental material he writes about
• and strategic formation
• a way of analyzing the relationship between texts
and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts,
even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and
referential power among themselves and thereafter
in the culture at large.

29
 Everyone who writes
about the Orient must
locate himself vis-å-vis the Orient

• Every writer on the Orient (and this is true

even of Homer) assumes some Oriental
precedent, some previous knowledge of the
Orient, to which he refers and on which he
relies.

30
• Thus there was ( and is)
a linguistic Orient,
a Freudian Orient,
a Spenglerian Orient,
a Darwinian Orient,
a racist Orient
—and so on.

31