Orientalism (39 page)

With such a Tennysonian Palace of Art in mind, Curzon and Cromer were enthusiastic members together of a departmental committee formed in 1909 to press for the creation of a school of Oriental studies. Aside from remarking wistfully that had he known the vernacular he would have been helped during his “famine tours” in India, Curzon argued for Oriental studies as part of the British responsibility to the Orient. On September 27, 1909, he told the House of Lords that

At a Mansion House conference on the subject five years later, Curzon finally dotted the i’s. Oriental studies were no intellectual luxury; they were, he said,

To a very great extent Curzon’s ideas about Oriental studies derive logically from a good century of British utilitarian administration of and philosophy about the Eastern colonies. The influence of Bentham and the Mills on British rule in the Orient (and India particularly) was considerable, and was effective in doing away with too much regulation and innovation; instead, as Eric Stokes has convincingly shown, utilitarianism combined with the legacies
of liberalism and evangelicalism as philosophies of British rule in the East stressed the rational importance of a strong executive armed with various legal and penal codes, a system of doctrines on such matters as frontiers and land rents, and everywhere an irreducible supervisory imperial authority.
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The cornerstone of the whole system was a constantly refined knowledge of the Orient, so that as traditional societies hastened forward and became modern commercial societies, there would be no loss of paternal British control, and no loss of revenue either. However, when Curzon referred somewhat inelegantly to Oriental studies as “the necessary furniture of Empire,” he was putting into a static image the transactions by which Englishmen and natives conducted their business and kept their places. From the days of Sir William Jones the Orient had been both what Britain ruled and what Britain knew about it: the coincidence between geography, knowledge, and power, with Britain always in the master’s place, was complete. To have said, as Curzon once did, that “the East is a University in which the scholar never takes his degree” was another way of saying that the East required one’s presence there more or less forever.
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But then there were the other European powers, France and Russia among them, that made the British presence always a (perhaps marginally) threatened one. Curzon was certainly aware that all the major Western powers felt towards the world as Britain did. The transformation of geography from “dull and pedantic”—Curzon’s phrase for what had now dropped out of geography as an academic subject—into “the most cosmopolitan of all sciences” argued
exactly
that new Western and widespread predilection. Not for nothing did Curzon in 1912 tell the Geographical Society, of which he was president, that

Geography was essentially the material underpinning for knowledge about the Orient. All the latent and unchanging characteristics of the Orient stood upon, were rooted in, its geography. Thus on the one hand the geographical Orient nourished its inhabitants, guaranteed their characteristics, and defined their specificity; on the other hand, the geographical Orient solicited the West’s attention, even as—by one of those paradoxes revealed so frequently by organized knowledge—East was East and West was West. The cosmopolitanism of geography was, in Curzon’s mind, its universal importance to the whole of the West, whose relationship to the rest of the world was one of frank covetousness. Yet geographical appetite could also take on the moral neutrality of an epistemological impulse to find out, to settle upon, to uncover—as when in
Heart of Darkness
Marlow confesses to having a passion for maps.

Seventy years or so before Marlow said this, it did not trouble Lamartine that what on a map was a blank space was inhabited by natives; nor, theoretically, had there been any reservation in the mind of Emer de Vattel, the Swiss-Prussian authority on international law, when in 1758 he invited European states to take possession of territory inhabited only by mere wandering tribes.
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The important thing was to dignify simple conquest with an idea, to turn the appetite for more geographical space into a theory about the special relationship between geography on the one hand and civilized or uncivilized peoples on the other. But to these rationalizations there was also a distinctively French contribution.

By the end of the nineteenth century, political and intellectual circumstances coincided sufficiently in France to make geography, and geographical speculation (in both senses of that word), an attractive national pastime. The general climate of opinion in Europe was propitious; certainly the successes of British imperialism spoke loudly enough for themselves. However, Britain always seemed to France and to French thinkers on the subject to block even a relatively successful French imperial role in the Orient. Before the Franco-Prussian War there was a good deal of wishful political thinking about the Orient, and it was not confined to poets and novelists. Here, for instance, is Saint-Marc Girardin writing in the
Revue des Deux Mondes
on March 15, 1862:

Of such views as this Disraeli would doubtless have said, as he often did, that France had only “sentimental interests” in Syria (which is the “Orient” of which Girardin was writing). The fiction of “populations souffrantes” had of course been used by Napoleon when he appealed to the Egyptians on their behalf against the Turks and for Islam. During the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties the suffering populations of the Orient were limited to the Christian minorities in Syria. And there was no record of “l’Orient” appealing to France for its salvation. It would have been altogether more truthful to say that Britain stood in France’s way in the Orient, for even if France genuinely felt a sense of obligation to the Orient (and there were some Frenchmen who did), there was very little France could do to get between Britain and the huge land mass it commanded from India to the Mediterranean.

Among the most remarkable consequences of the War of 1870 in France were a tremendous efflorescence of geographical societies and a powerfully renewed demand for territorial acquisition. At the end of 1871 the Société de géographie de Paris declared itself
no longer confined to “scientific speculation.” It urged the citizenry not to “forget that our former preponderance was contested from the day we ceased to compete … in the conquests of civilization over barbarism.” Guillaume Depping, a leader of what has come to be called the geographical movement, asserted in 1881 that during the 1870 war “it was the schoolmaster who triumphed,” meaning that the real triumphs were those of Prussian scientific geography over French strategic sloppiness. The government’s
Journal officiel
sponsored issue after issue centered on the virtues (and profits) of geographical exploration and colonial adventure; a citizen could learn in one issue from de Lesseps of “the opportunities in Africa” and from Gamier of “the exploration of the Blue River.” Scientific geography soon gave way to “commercial geography,” as the connection between national pride in scientific and civilizational achievement and the fairly rudimentary profit motive was urged, to be channeled into support for colonial acquisition. In the words of one enthusiast, “The geographical societies are formed to break the fatal charm that holds us enchained to our shores.” In aid of this liberating quest all sorts of schemes were spun out, including the enlisting of Jules Verne—whose “unbelievable success,” as it was called, ostensibly displayed the scientific mind at a very high peak of ratiocination—to head “a round-the-world campaign of scientific exploration,” and a plan for creating a vast new sea just south of the North African coast, as well as a project for “binding” Algeria to Senegal by railroad—“a ribbon of steel,” as the projectors called it.
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Much of the expansionist fervor in France during the last third of the nineteenth century was generated out of an explicit wish to compensate for the Prussian victory in 1870–1871 and, no less important, the desire to match British imperial achievements. So powerful was the latter desire, and out of so long a tradition of Anglo-French rivalry in the Orient did it derive, that France seemed literally haunted by Britain, anxious in all things connected with the Orient to catch up with and emulate the British. When in the late 1870s, the Société académique indo-chinoise reformulated its goals, it found it important to “bring Indochina into the domain of Orientalism.” Why? In order to turn Cochin China into a “French India.” The absence of substantial colonial holdings was blamed by military men for that combination of military and commercial weakness in the war with Prussia, to say nothing of long-standing and pronounced colonial inferiority compared with Britain. The
“power of expansion of the Western races,” argued a leading geographer, La Roncière Le Noury, “its superior causes, its elements, its influences on human destinies, will be a beautiful study for future historians.” Yet only if the white races indulged their taste for voyaging—a mark of their intellectual supremacy—could colonial expansion occur.
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From such theses as this came the commonly held view of the Orient as a geographical space to be cultivated, harvested, and guarded. The images of agricultural care for and those of frank sexual attention to the Orient proliferated accordingly. Here is a typical effusion by Gabriel Charmes, writing in 1880:

Another thinker, Leroy-Beaulieu, elaborated this philosophy still further:

This equation of self-reproduction with colonization led Leroy-Beaulieu to the somewhat sinister idea that whatever is lively in a modern society is “magnified by this pouring out of its exuberant activity on the outside.” Therefore, he said,