Following the work of Edward Said (1935-2003) and the associated postcolonial wave of scholarship that arose in the 1990's, most scholars working on nineteenth-century orientalist art concentrated their attention on ideological questions and attempted to demonstrate the political implications that were the key factors in its creation. Few researchers have delved into the issues of commercialization and marketability of orientalist imagery. Since art historians stressed the agency of the individual specialists of oriental culture, when considering the orientalist publications, they have dissociated the illustrations included in these books from their original context of production and from their attached texts, which were often written by other orientalists, and thus ascribed a particular value to them as free standing images made by a single author.

In this dissertation I explore the process of production and the system of organization of the nineteenth-century orientalist book industry on Egypt (1840--1880), by examining a variety of textual and visual sources produced by the key players of this industry, such as Emile Prisse d'Avennes (1807-79). By focusing on two orientalist publications to which Prisse contributed, namely the Oriental album (London, 1848) and L'art arabe (Paris, 1868-1877), I examine the extent to which the materiality of these books, their unstable notion of authorship, the complex relationships between publishers, artists, writers and printmakers, and lastly the new technologies of reproduction affected this orientalist book production and its representation of Egypt. This study aims to recast the notion of an independent orientalist voice in the hope of contributing to the postcolonial understanding of orientalism, by considering it not uniquely as a cultural construct, but also through nineteenth-century publishing practices that were undergoing changes, as the main engine of production, dissemination and naturalization of this orientalist imagery.