GEOPOLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS AND THE RISE OF ORIENTAL STUDIES IN EUROPE

The development of Oriental Studies as a serious academic discipline within European circles came about as a result of the geopolitical relationships that were taking place during the eighteenth and ninetieth centuries. The discipline expanded because of the interactions of Europeans with the East during trade, travel, colonialism, and wars. This article looks into the ways in which spatial political events facilitated the growth of Oriental Studies, discussing many development stages, institutions, and people involved while placing this movement into a broader scope of history. This article examines the evolution of the coined term Oriental Studies in Europe with an emphasis on the geopolitical and colonial circumstances that prevailed during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It analyzes how European Empire, colonialism, and intellectual paradigms such as Romanticism and philology contributed to the expansion of the discipline. The article further sheds light on the politics of the disciplinary practice of Oriental Studies, its affiliations with imperialism, and the evolution of the discipline under the impact of disputes like decolonization and the Cold War. These are important issues today as well, in particular with the growing demand to change the research traditions and to adopt the approaches of the indigenous people of the researched areas.