Last Tuesday, Shippensburg University’s Department of History was delighted to host Professor Andrew Rotter, the Charles A. Dana Historian at Colgate University, as the speaker for our annual World History Lecture. His talk, “Olfactory Empire: Smell and the Empire in India and the Philippines,” looked at how British people experienced smell in their colonies. His conclusion? With disparagement and disgust, which sort of goes along with how they viewed the inhabitants of these lands they had tried to take over. The foreign spices overwhelmed them, but the raw sewage repulsed them. Of course, an irony about all the commotion concerning the open sewers is that the British had of course been stewing in their own miasmic cesspools quite recently because of rapid insustrialization.
Dr. Rotter gave his public talk, which included an invigorating Q&A period after, through zoom (I will post a link to access the recording in the comments).
Sources: Https://supmediasite.passhe.edu/Mediasite/Play/54a9691430184a28ae0e354a23bec4831d
