 In " The Mightier Pen ? Edward Saïd and the Double Standards of Inside @-@ out Colonialism " ( 1993 ) , the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner said that Said 's contentions that the West dominated the East for two millennia were unsupportable , because the Ottoman Empire had been a political and military threat to Europe until the late 17th century . In " Disraeli as an Orientalist : The <unk> Errors of Edward Said " ( 2005 ) , Mark Proudman reported that Said incorrectly described the British Empire as extending from Egypt to India in the late 19th century , as the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire were simultaneously active in that geopolitical region . 
