Как-то туманно, понимаю общий смысл этого отрывка, но выразить на языке родных осин не могу, а надо. Пожалуйста, если есть такая возможность, направьте по верному следу. Заранее благодарю за ответы.

Cultural strength is not something we can discuss very easily and
one of the purposes of the present work is to illustrate, analyze,
and reflect upon Orientalism as an exercise of cultural strength.
In other words, it is better not to risk generalizations about so
vague and yet so important a notion as cultural strength until a
good deal of material has been analyzed first. But at the outset one
can say that so far as the West was concerned during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, an assumption had been made that the Orient and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West. The Orient was viewed as framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual. Orientalism, then, is knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison, or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or governing.
During the early years of the twentieth century, men like Balfour
and Cromer could say what they said, in the way they did, because
a still earlier tradition of Orientalism than the nineteenth-century
one provided them with a vocabulary, imagery, rhetoric, and
figures with which to say it. Yet Orientalism reinforced, and was
reinforced by, the certain knowledge that Europe or the West
literally commanded the vastly greater part of the earth's surface.