In Benjamin Disraeli’s 1847 novel Tancred, there is a short line that Edward Said would return to more than a century later: “The East is a career.”
Five words. But they tell us rather a lot.
For generations of ambitious Western men, the East was not merely somewhere to visit, study, or govern. Knowledge of it could become employment, authority, social standing, and, sometimes, considerable wealth. The people who actually lived there could disappear somewhere along the way. Their countries became objects to be studied, administered, reorganized, negotiated over, and, eventually, invested in.
This is where Edward Said’s Orientalism remains so important. His argument was never simply that Western writers misunderstood the East or that some of them held unpleasant prejudices. His deeper concern was the relationship between knowledge and power. Who gets to describe another society? Whose description becomes authoritative? And what happens when that knowledge begins opening the doors of government, diplomacy, and money?
Stay ahead of the geopolitical week.
MD Briefing delivers expert analysis across five global fronts — the Indo-Pacific, energy, geoeconomics, European security, and the Middle East — every Monday morning. Free.
Two very different careers, separated by two centuries, make the question uncomfortable: James Mill and Jared Kushner.
James Mill’s India
James Mill published The History of British India in 1817. It was an enormous intellectual undertaking.
There was, however, one rather significant problem.
Mill had never been to India.
He knew none of its languages. Yet he produced an authoritative history of a vast subcontinent containing societies, religions, and intellectual traditions he had encountered principally through texts produced within the structures of empire. In the preface to his first volume, he openly celebrated this pipeline: the “fortunate publicity of parliamentary proceedings.”
That distance did not make him cautious. Quite the opposite.
Mill portrayed Indian civilization as backward and deeply inferior to European society. Influenced by utilitarian thinking, he believed India required rational administration, legal reform, and disciplined government. Colonial rule could therefore be represented not simply as domination but as improvement.
And here Said’s point about knowledge and power becomes tangible.
Mill did not need to experience India for his knowledge of India to acquire authority. The colonial archive could provide the material; the European scholar could organize it; imperial institutions could then recognize that organization as expertise.
They did.
In 1819, the East India Company appointed Mill assistant examiner of India correspondence on £800 a year. His salary rose through successive promotions, reaching £2,000 shortly before his death in 1836.
Think about the sequence.
A man who had never visited India wrote an authoritative history explaining India to Britain. Two years later, Mill entered the service of the very institution governing India. From London, he subsequently participated in the administrative machinery of the empire.
“The East is a career” suddenly sounds less like literature.
The story continued into the next generation. John Stuart Mill also spent decades working for the East India Company while becoming one of liberalism’s most celebrated philosophers.
And there sits one of the great contradictions of nineteenth-century liberal thought.
In On Liberty, Mill defended individual freedom against coercive power. Yet he famously excluded societies he classified as “barbarians” from that principle, arguing that despotism could be legitimate if its objective was their “improvement.”
Liberty for some. Tutelage for others.
The contradiction could be resolved only by constructing a hierarchy of civilization. Europe occupied the position of political maturity. Others remained somewhere behind it, waiting to be taught.
From East India House to Private Equity
Two centuries later, the institutions are different. So is the language.
Nobody needs to write a history of Oriental civilization before doing business in the Gulf. Today we hear about investment funds, strategic partnerships, sovereign wealth, regional security, and deals.
But an older question survives underneath the new vocabulary: what happens when access to another region becomes convertible into private economic power?
Jared Kushner offers a striking contemporary case.
As a senior adviser during Donald Trump’s first presidency, Kushner became deeply involved in US Middle East policy, including relations with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. After leaving government, he established Affinity Partners.
The financial transformation was extraordinary.
Affinity subsequently attracted billions of dollars from foreign investors, particularly sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. A 2024 filing reported that 99 percent of its assets under management were attributable to non-US clients and investors. There is nothing inherently improper about a former government official entering private business, nor does foreign investment itself demonstrate corruption or political influence. The more serious question concerns the overlap between public access and subsequent private opportunity.
That overlap has attracted congressional scrutiny.
The US Senate Finance Committee reported in 2024 that Affinity had collected as much as $157 million in fees from foreign clients, including $87 million from Saudi Arabia. Its investigation raised questions about conflicts of interest and whether relationships developed through government service had become financially valuable afterwards.
Those are allegations and concerns raised by investigators, not proof that foreign governments purchased US policy.
But they are serious enough to demand attention.
And the story has become still more complicated. In 2026, with Kushner again participating in US diplomatic activity while remaining connected to Affinity, congressional Democrats opened further inquiries into how his governmental role was being separated from his business relationships.
This is where the comparison with James Mill becomes useful, although not because the two men are identical. They plainly are not.
The connection lies elsewhere.
It lies in the conversion of knowledge, access, and proximity to power into a career.
Where Did the People Go?
There is another connection, and perhaps this one matters more.
Where are the people?
When James Mill constructed India from London, millions of Indians became categories within somebody else’s system of knowledge: Hindu civilisation, Muslim civilisation, customs, laws, defects, and stages of development.
Something similar can happen when we discuss the contemporary Middle East almost entirely through rulers, sovereign wealth funds, security agreements, investment corridors, and diplomatic deals.
Saudi Arabia becomes its public investment fund.
Qatar becomes the capital.
The UAE becomes an investment.
Palestine becomes a negotiating problem.
Iran becomes a nuclear file.
And people vanish.
This is precisely why Edward Said matters beyond the history of nineteenth-century colonialism. Orientalism is not simply a collection of offensive stereotypes about Arabs, Muslims, or Indians. It asks us to examine the structures through which some people acquire the authority to define other societies while remaining remarkably distant from the lives of those being defined.
James Mill could write about India without India.
Modern diplomacy can sometimes negotiate the Middle East without Middle Eastern people.
And private capital can value the region in billions while human beings appear nowhere on the balance sheet.
The Geography of the Deal
Disraeli could not have imagined sovereign wealth funds, private-equity management fees, or twenty-first-century Washington. But he understood something about the political geography of ambition.
“The East is a career.”
For James Mill, knowledge about India helped produce institutional authority and personal security. For John Stuart Mill, empire could coexist with liberalism once colonized peoples were placed outside liberalism’s immediate protections. In our own century, access to Middle Eastern rulers and state capital can generate opportunities whose value is measured in billions rather than thousands.
The forms have changed. The question Said asked has not.
Who has the power to turn someone else’s world into knowledge, policy, access, and ultimately personal opportunity?
And there is one final question, which may be the simplest of all.
While powerful men build careers from the East, what happens to the people who actually live there?
We need only look at Gaza to understand why that question is not historical.
Land can become a security problem, a diplomatic file, a redevelopment proposal, or even an investment opportunity. Its people can be discussed endlessly while their own political agency becomes secondary.
That is the final violence of the geography of the deal. First, people are turned into an abstraction. Then somebody else makes a career out of deciding their future.
