Edward Said's book is one of the most influential scholarly books of the last 30 years, as it threw into doubt so much of what had been (and what was being presented) as "knowledge" generated by British and French scholars about the rest of the world.  Britain and France were, in the long nineteenth century, the leading centers of academic knowledge, as well as the leading empires in the world, not coincidentally.  (The United States became, of course, the leading center of academic knowledge and the leading empire in the world in the long twentieth century.)  Both Britain and France gained unparalleled access to other countries around the world, and seemed to "study" them intensively, all the while imagining that their brutal imperial interference in many of those countries amounted to acts of benevolence.  Said demonstrated that all that supposed "study" and "knowledge" was utterly hollow, revealing everything about cultural ideologies in Britain and France, and nothing about the countries that had been "studied."

1.  How did this happen, according to Said?  How did British and French authors omit from their books the very countries they were studying?  Those books were all about those countries, so what was missing?

2.  How, according to Said, did knowledge attach itself to power?  After all, ideas aren't particularly meaningful if they don't have political effects.  How did ideas of British and French scholars actually become powerful?