From the beginning of the book, Said emphasizes that “the Orient” is a product of the Western imagination. It is a false image, a geographical and cultural place that does not truly exist. Western travelers correlate Orientalist thought with physical locations, and they are left disappointed when visiting the East and finding that it is not what they expected it to be. 

To model this, Said’s introduction quotes a French journalist in Beirut who lamented the destruction of “the Orient of [French writers] Chateaubriand and Nerval.” Later, Said points out that these writers were themselves disappointed by what they saw. Their expectations were based on their expectations about an ideally exotic “Orient” which never really existed.

Even more significant than this, though, is that the French journalist saw the Orient as the creation and possession of French writers. He was visiting Beirut amid a brutal civil war, but his primary concern was not for the real people who had been killed and maimed. Instead, he regretted the destruction of Western fictions. Said argues that this dehumanization of Eastern people continues today in academia, politics, and the media.

Said insists that Orientalism is a political and military project as well as a literary one. The two go hand in hand because literary Orientalism not only inspires colonialism but also justifies it. People in the East are continually depicted as irrational and childlike, products of an inferior culture who are incapable of self-control and therefore not fit to govern themselves.

Said uses Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man” to explain how the West saw itself, visualizing itself as a natural ruler and entirely antithetical to the dependent “Oriental.” Kipling’s idealized portrayal of the courageous, stoical, level-headed White Man is not new; instead, it is the culmination of a project Said traces through the millennia. The assumption of Eastern inferiority and Western superiority is evident in early ancient Greek literature. Authors like Homer and Aeschylus portrayed Eastern rulers as decadent and weak, destined for defeat at the hands of a superior European power.

In the final section of the book, Said shows how the same attitudes that fueled nineteenth-century European imperialism have contributed to the state of modern relations between America and the Middle East. Even still, the West uses its intellectual power to frame “the Orient” as it sees fit, creating narratives that validate—and even encourage—policies that replicate imperialist models. 

Said devotes the majority of the text to a historical exploration of Orientalism. However, he emphasizes that Orientalist attitudes have not disappeared in the twentieth century. The fact that Orientalism is often latent rather than manifest only makes it more difficult to identify and challenge.

In the modern era, the United States of America is the world’s leading military, political, and economic power. Said points out that America’s idea of the Orient is different from Europe's. Even the geographical area the word describes is much wider, including China, Japan, and Indochina as well as the Middle East and India. However, this makes no difference in political terms, as the people who formulate American foreign policy are steeped in Orientalist ideas.

In the final pages, Said offers some hope that contemporary scholars may be rejecting or disregarding this way of looking at the East. However, he sees no sign that the West is prepared to retreat from its dominant position in the sphere of practical politics, as the rhetoric of contemporary politicians echoes that of politicians from the previous century.