This book offers a sensory history of the British in India from the formal imposition of their rule to its end and the Americans in the Philippines from annexation to independence. A social and cultural history of empire, it focuses on quotidian life. It analyzes how the senses created mutual impressions of the agents of imperialism and their subjects and highlights connections between apparently disparate items, including the lived experience of empire, the otherwise unremarkable comments (and complaints) found in memoirs and reports, the appearance of lepers, the sound of bells, the odor of excrement, the feel of cloth against skin, the first taste of a mango or meat spiced with cumin. Men and women in imperial India and the Philippines had different ideas from the start about what looked, sounded, smelled, felt, and tasted good or bad. Both the British and the Americans saw themselves as the civilizers of what they judged backward societies and believed that a vital part of the civilizing process was to put the senses in the right order of priority and to ensure them against offense or affront. People without manners who respected the senses lacked self-control; they were uncivilized and thus unfit for self-government. Societies that looked shabby, were noisy and smelly, felt wrong, and consumed unwholesome food in unmannerly ways were not prepared to form independent polities and stand on their own. It was the duty of allegedly more sensorily advanced westerners to put the senses right before withdrawing the most obvious manifestations of their power.
