Culture and Imperialism

Culture and Imperialism is a collection of essays by Edward Said published in 1993. Said attempts to trace the connection between imperialism and culture in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It followed his highly influential Orientalism, published in 1978.

Said conceived of Culture and Imperialism as an attempt to "expand the argument" of Orientalism "to describe a more general pattern of relationships between the modern metropolitan west and its overseas territories."

Subject

In a series of essays, Said argues the impact of mainstream culture (mainly British writers of the 19th and early 20th century, like Jane Austen and Rudyard Kipling) on colonialism and imperialism, and conversely how imperialism, resistance to it, and decolonization influenced the English and French novel. In the introduction to the work, Said explains his focus on the novel: he "consider[s] it the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is particularly interesting to study. The prototypical modern realistic novel is Robinson Crusoe, and certainly not accidentally it is about a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-European island."