Summary
Lord Curzon, viceregal colleague of Lord Cromer, who in Said’s account in Orientalism spoke the imperial lingua franca more obtrusively even than Cromer, delineating the relationship between Britain and the Orient in terms of possession, and who pressed for a school of Oriental studies as part of the necessary furniture of Empire (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.222-226 / printed p.213-217).
Details
- For Curzon, the Empire was not an “object of ambition” but “first and foremost, a great historical and political and sociological fact”; in 1909 he reminded delegates to the Imperial Press Conference at Oxford that Britain trains and sends out the colonies’ governors, administrators, judges, teachers, preachers and lawyers, and pictured the Imperial fabric as a Tennysonian “Palace of Art” whose foundations are in Britain, whose Colonies are the pillars, and high above all the vastness of an Asiatic dome (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.222 / printed p.213).
- Curzon and Cromer were together enthusiastic members of a departmental committee formed in 1909 to press for the creation of a school of Oriental studies; on September 27, 1909, Curzon told the House of Lords that familiarity with the languages, customs, feelings, traditions, history and religion of the people of the East — the capacity to understand “the genius of the East” — is the sole basis on which Britain is likely to maintain in the future the position it has won (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.223 / printed p.214).
- At a Mansion House conference five years later he called the creation of such a school, later to become the London University School of Oriental and African Studies, “part of the necessary furniture of Empire”, and the filling of the gap a patriotic duty to the Empire (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.223 / printed p.214).
- As president of the Geographical Society he told it in 1912 that an absolute revolution had occurred in the teaching and public estimation of geography, which he recognized as the handmaid of history and a sister science to economics and politics; geography was essentially the material underpinning for knowledge about the Orient (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.224-225 / printed p.215-216).