Editing Imperialism (section)

===Orientalism and imaginative geography===
[[File:Antoine-Jean Gros - Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa.jpg|thumb|[[Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa|''Napoleon visiting the plague victims of Jaffa'']], by [[Antoine-Jean Gros]]]]
Imperial control, territorial and [[Cultural imperialism|cultural]], is justified through [[discourse]]s about the imperialists' understanding of different spaces.<ref name="Hubbard, P. 2010 p. 239">Hubbard, P., & Kitchin, R. Eds. ''Key Thinkers on Space and Place'', 2nd. Ed. Los Angeles, Calif:Sage Publications. 2010. p. 239.</ref> Conceptually, [[imagined geographies]] explain the limitations of the imperialist understanding of the societies of the different spaces inhabited by the non–European Other.<ref name="Hubbard, P. 2010 p. 239"/>

In ''[[Orientalism (book)|Orientalism]]'' (1978), [[Edward Said]] said that the West developed the concept of [[The Orient]]—an imagined geography of the [[Eastern world]]—which functions as an [[Essentialism|essentializing]] discourse that represents neither the ethnic diversity nor the social reality of the Eastern world.<ref>Sharp, J. (2008). Geographies of Postcolonialism. Los Angeles:London:Sage Publications. pp. 16, 17.</ref> That by reducing the East into cultural essences, the imperial discourse uses place-based identities to create [[Difference (philosophy)|cultural difference]] and psychologic distance between "We, the West" and "They, the East" and between "Here, in the West" and "There, in the East".<ref name="Said, Edward 1979 p.357">Said, Edward. "Imaginative Geography and its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental", ''Orientalism''. New York:Vintage. p. 357.</ref>

That cultural differentiation was especially noticeable in the books and paintings of early [[Oriental studies]], the European examinations of the Orient, which misrepresented the East as irrational and backward, the opposite of the rational and progressive West.<ref name="Hubbard, P. 2010 p. 239"/><ref>Sharp, J. ''Geographies of Postcolonialism''. Los Angeles: London: Sage Publications. 2008. p. 22.</ref> Defining the East as a negative vision of the Western world, as its inferior, not only increased the sense-of-self of the West, but also was a way of ordering the East, and making it known to the West, so that it could be dominated and controlled.<ref>Sharp, J. (2008). Geographies of Postcolonialism. Los Angeles:London: Sage Publications. p. 18.</ref><ref>Said, Edward.(1979) "Imaginative Geography and its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental", ''Orientalism''. New York: Vintage. p. 361</ref> Therefore, Orientalism was the ideological justification of early Western imperialism—a body of knowledge and ideas that rationalized social, cultural, political, and economic control of other, non-white peoples.<ref name="Said, Edward 1979 p.357"/><ref name=Gilmartin2009/>{{Rp|116}}