Preface

It will soon be forty years since Edward Said’s book Orientalism appeared, yet it remains a crucial reference point for most of the research on Europe’s cultural encounters with and policies towards the rest of the world, regardless of whether scholars uphold or critique the Saidian model. The other crucial factors in transforming the studies of Europe’s imperial and colonial past were the collapse of communism and the demise of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. On the o..