Conclusion

This chapter asks: how does a nation leave its imperial possessions when the period of empire ends? There are complicated logistics involved in this. The main focus of the conclusion is what happens when the conquerors leave the conquered—in other words, when empire is over. It gives an historical account of how independence occurred in each of the two countries, and relates the history of the end to the senses. The end of empire in India and the Philippines brought changes to the Britons and Americans that were in their own ways as profound as those felt by its subjects.

Touching, Feeling, and Healing

This chapter considers touch in empire: it asks us to imagine how the body would feel being moved to a completely new environment. Hapticity, the chapter argues, is both the pauper and king of the senses. It is generally relegated to the realm of the lower senses, beneath even smell and taste. Conversely, touch can also be seen as the most powerful of the senses. It was of great importance in medieval Europe, for example. The metaphors used to describe empire were frequently haptic. The chapter also looks at how the Britons and Americans in India and the Philippines wanted to change the people they encountered. Health was a great motivator in this desire.

Educating

The chapter provides a sensory history of empire in the two countries, India and the Philippines, at the turn of the twentieth century. By that point, the process of visualizing Indian and Filipino subjects was well underway by their colonizers. The chapter looks at sight and sound and how they can be used to narrate the story at this point. The dynamics of Anglo-American soundscapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transferred readily and deliberately to sites of empire, to India and the Philippines. In particular, it looks at the music in the two empires at this time.

The Senses and Civilization

This chapter introduces the idea of how the senses were important to Britons arriving in India and Americans arriving in the Philippines. It provides examples of reactions in terms of sensual responses to illustrate this. British and American senses told them many things about their hosts. Indians and Filipinos were, they believed, different from themselves, or, in other words, fundamentally Other. The chapter asks what this Other was to the new arrivals. Violations of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste represented to the westerners a lack of refinement and decency in those they encountered. They construed difference in several ways, but most of all as racial ones. They recoiled in fear and sought to distance themselves from those whose habits reflected their crudeness and terrified them so.

Governing

This chapter explores the reactions of the senses once war has abated. It begins with an examination of sight. Once the period of war had ended in India and similarly in the Philippines, it asks, who were the people of India and the Philippines? How many of them were there? Where did they live? What did they look like? These were the questions the conquering Britons and Americans would have asked. The chapter comments on the “magic” witnessed in India by the British eyes: “jugglers,” as the British termed the people who displayed such magic. The chapter then goes on to describe the similar yet different response of the Americans to the Filipinos they encountered.

Fighting

This chapter focuses on the sensual response to violence in the first few years of empire in India and the Philippines. It outlines the history of how the British came to India in the mid-nineteenth century, and the Americans to the Philippines at the end of the century. It also shows how important a part violence and war played in the creation of these two empires. The chapter relates violence and rebellion to the senses of taste and sight. It examines the Great Rebellion in India (1857-58) and the American war in the Philippines (1898-1902), looking at their causes and consequences, and the first sensual sensory encounters in these places. The chapter also looks at how soundscapes can be changed by war.

Nourishing

This chapter argues that taste is in many respects the most malleable of all the senses. Food plays an important part in shaping new encounters of empire. Along with smell, taste is an intimate sense, one drawn deep into the body by its presence in the mouth and through the nose. It profoundly affected the perceptions of the Others encountered by Britons and Americans. Metaphors of empire were haptic, as the previous chapter argues, but many were also gustatory. This chapter looks at the tastes in Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century and how they relate to empire in India and the Philippines.

Sanitizing

This chapter looks at the sense of smell, which it argues was a very important sense in the encounters that the Britons and Americans had with the people of India and the Philippines. They talked of the smell of the people, the food, the drink, and the environment. As is true of all senses, there is a biological and a cultural basis for perceptions of odor. Most smells also have complicated meanings, which have shifted over time and depend on place. What emerges from the writings of Britons and Americans in Asia at the time, the chapter shows, was a sense of anxiety about their safety in a tropical environment. Strong odors frightened them perhaps most of all.

Introduction

The introductory chapter of Empires of the Senses looks at the meaning of empire. Empire means many different things at different times: economics, geopolitics, a desire for greatness but also violence, an imposition of control, and resistance. This book, the introduction explains, argues that all human relationships, including imperial ones, are shaped by all five senses; how we understand others, also how we feel about them, and thus how we act toward them. The introduction outlines the arguments presented in the rest of the book. The chapters are organized by sense, but they also overlap in their treatment of the senses and empire.