By Alex Usher. After World War II, area studies (that is, interdisciplinary studies of various world regions) took off in the United States, essentially because both institutions and governments decided that if the country was going to run the free world, it might help to know something about the various bits of it. 
The CIA had ties to area studies, but so too did the major old-school foundations like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie. But this was by no means the first time that authorities had tried to use universities’ expertise in the humanities to strategic purposes.  In the early 14^th century, the Catholic church was still reeling from the loss of the Holy Land to the Arabs, and there was a desire to turn things around in part by trying to convert the infidel.  At the Council of Vienne (that’s Vienne, France, just south of Lyon, not Vienna) in 1311, the church decided to set up endowed chairs in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic both in Rome to serve the papacy directly but also at the Ivy League of the High Middle Ages (Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca).  Not quite knowledge in the service of the state – but given the link between religious control and territorial control, it’s close enough. More...