Orientalism functions through educational institutions to build hegemony and consent with Western domination.

As early as the 19th century, European colonial states established a direct link between the state and educational system in order to use the social sciences for their own benefit and further exploit and colonialize Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. As a result of the economic needs driven by European industrialization, colonial states began to support and finance social science fields such as history and anthropology in order to study colonized regions and design a comprehensive foreign policy vis a vis ethnicities, religions, cultures, traditions, and social structures. We can trace the complicated relationship between Western colonialism and imperialism and the Western educational system to the 18th century. Edward Said describes this colonialist knowledge production and criticizes the motivations driving Middle East and Islamic studies in Western academia, especially in the postcolonial period. He understood the real impetus behind Orientalism as non-academic, but instead policy-oriented with the objective of further colonialism and imperialism. For example, anthropology was established as an academic field not because some people in Europe were really interested in other cultures, but due to an interest in studying other cultures and societies for the purpose of further exploitation. As a result, most of the early anthropologists were supported and financed by the French and British state in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.