Empire of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines by Andrew J. Rotter (review)

The British and Americans who colonized Asia in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries often could not stand the sight and smell of those they colonized. Or, for that matter, the sound of their native tongues, the touch of their skin, or the taste of their food. They chafed (both literally and figuratively) from the heat and humidity of tropical climes. Conversely, colonial subjects often found themselves repelled by the odors and confounded by the habits of their rulers. Such sensory perceptions are the focal points of Andrew Rotter's fascinating comparative study of colonial India and the Philippines, Empire of the Senses. According to Rotter, Britain and the United States both took part in a project of liberal imperialism, of "nations intent on bettering the conditions of their subjects and certain that the imposition of their institutions would do so" (p. 49). Sensory perceptions of colonial agents and subjects were vital to this civilizing project. Constructing an empire was not just top-down, planned from above, but an "embodied experience, for both its agents and subjects" (p. 2) imbricated in quotidian, asymmetrical encounters on the ground, which were visceral, tactile, and pungent. And the more the colonizers and colonized came into contact through their shared colonial experience, the more their perceptions of each other changed.

Empire of the Senses makes two valuable historiographic contributions. First, it builds on the study of empire as a comparative and shared process involving ideas in motion. British and Americans engaged in a "transimperial exchange of information" in which "imperial agents were sharing ideas about how to address common problems, among them how to combat disease such as malaria, cholera, and tuberculosis, what to do about lepers, how to manage sewage, how best to educate Indians and Filipinos, and more generally what to do with their puzzling and refractory Asian subjects" (pp. 5–6). "Sensory stereotypes, preferences, and practices" were "portable and powerful, well-sharpened instruments" that traveled from the far-flung fringes of empire to the metropoles and vice versa (p. 7). Second, it makes a crucial contribution to study of the history of everyday life; according to Rotter, "empires were held together by everyday patterns: how rulers and subjects interacted, how they saw, heard, smelled, felt, and fed each other. The name of the cultural formation of empires was civilization" (p. 4). Empire of the Senses builds on the cutting-edge work in the history of the senses by scholars such as Mark Smith and Alain Corbin, and is theoretically informed by anthropologists and sociologists including Mary Louise Pratt, Clifford Geertz, Pierre Bourdieu, and Norbert Elias. Rotter's work also contributes to the burgeoning global scholarship on settler colonialism by arguing that empire can only be fully understood on the ground.

The chapters of the book are mostly thematically organized. After two table-setting chapters—one that describes the importance of the senses to empire's civilizing project and the other that outlines how bodies came into contact through war—the remaining chapters cover each of the five major senses. Rotter argues that one sense, above all, has held hegemony over the others: sight. As James Scott has famously argued, states govern by rendering their subjects legible; cadastral surveys allow for the taxation of land, just as population registers allow for conscription and public health measures. If sight is the dominant sense of rational governance, then sound, smell, taste, and touch provide what is missing: a window into the irrational. "Empires are emotional communities," Rotter writes, "and emotions are triggered by the senses" (p. 265). To Rotter, the problem is that sight has often been analyzed separately from the other senses in historical scholarship. Sight alone does not provide the full picture (pun intended): a picture may be worth a thousand words, but thousands more can be written if you add the ability to scratch and sniff...