ABSTRACT
The English poet William Blake (1757-1827) once wrote that ‘the foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa, as Englishmen suppose’ (in Said 1994b: 65). The role of culture in keeping imperialism intact cannot be overestimated, because it is through culture that the assumption of the ‘divine right’ of imperial powers to rule is vigorously and authoritatively supported. Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism begins from this premise, that the institutional, political and economic operations of imperialism are nothing without the power of the culture that maintains them. What, for instance, enabled the British in India to rule a society of hundreds of millions with no more than 100,000 people? What is it about that presence that induced identification and sometimes admiration in Indian elites despite the history of expropriation and exploitation that characterised the Raj? Edward Said’s argument is that it is culture (despite its sometimes overweening assumptions) that provides this kind of moral power, which achieves a kind of ‘ideological pacification’ (ibid.: 67).
