What do empires smell like? History books do not say so. They will talk of guns or railroads or commerce, but hardly about the air people breathed, as colonial regimes overhauled their worlds. Olfactory senses, however, were one of the octopus tentacles of control that the empire practised.
Colonisation often took the form of being informed what your city ought to smell like, what your body ought to smell like, and what scents were civilised and primitive. Colonial history becomes visible not only in the code of law and map but also in the shape of perfume bottles, fumigation chambers and scented streets.
Scent as civilisation, scent as stigma
In India, before colonisation, a range of perfumes and fragrant oils found their way into everyday lives. Courts were filled with the fragrance of rose and sandalwood, and homes were full of incense and of garlands in the temples. Smell was status, spirituality, and culture. A wisp of attar would indicate cheer, gentility, or a way of worship.
Moreover, the British brought with them another sense philosophy of smell. To Victorian tastes, powerful odours were suspect — associated with dirt, disease, and Oriental excess. Cleanliness equalled not having an odour, and the odour of rosewater or musk indicated backwardness. Soap makers started advertising in India and they were inculcating that progress smelt like carbolic soap.
This had nothing to do with taste, but it was politics. By redefining what was expected to pass as civilised fragrance, the empire embedded its notion of culture within the pores of the skin. To be European was to smell European. To smell traditional was to be at risk of being labelled unclean, immoral and uncultured.
Deodorising the city
The colonial governments also attempted to regulate the odours of the whole cities.
A striking example is Bombay (now Mumbai), which was besieged in his time and totally destroyed. In 1896, a devastating outbreak of plague was wrecking the city. Police took the blame for overcrowded streets and the stench associated with working-class neighbourhoods. The reaction was not simply that of medicine but also an architectural one: terraces were pulled down, streets were widened, and a new street, Princess Street, was cut through old residential areas to allow the air to be scoured clean by the sea breeze.
Furthermore, ordering of smellscapes was what looked like public health as well. Tanneries, abattoirs and poor families came out of sight and out of scent. The streets of colonialism were paved with asphalt, gardens, and disinfectants. Even the air was segregated: deodorised in the interests of the elite, stigmatised in relation to the poor.
Similar transformations were undertaken by the French colonial planners in North Africa. In Algiers, the European-style avenues were cut across the old Casbah, which was declared unhealthy and malodorous. Likewise, the Moroccan cities were allotted green sanitary strips between the neighbourhoods and the indigenous medinas. They were not merely metropolitan schemes of planning but scent maps: One area was designed to emit a smell of freshness and modernity, whereas the other one was to feel like dirt and tradition.
The empire of sulphur
Even the oceans were not immune to the stench of colonial politics.
At the beginning of the 20th century, vessels which were travelling to Europe or across colonies were brought into the stations of quarantine and fumigated with sulphur dioxide. This modern hygiene had left cabins stinking of gases of rotten eggs. Goods, sailors and migrants had to breathe it as well.
Here, the empire was made most literal: the reek of sulphur in the nose of the watch. Nothing can enter the ports of the empire unless it has passed through paper, a check-up and a scent test.
Racism in the nose
Colonial racism did this quite frequently, using the discourse of smell. Travel writers, officials, and settlers used to describe colonised populations as stench-ridden or smelly. Africans, Indians, and Arabs were said to have smells of sweat, spices, or dirt, indicating that they are inferior.
This was not harmless prejudice — it was a defence of justification. If certain groups were deemed naturally filthy, they could then be segregated, force-washed, and culturally cleansed as necessary. Smell had become a substitute weapon of stigma that marked entire groups of people as either derogatory or uncivilised.
Meanwhile, colonisers exoticised some smells. The very Europeans who denied the hygienic qualities of Indian perfuming activities enthusiastically sold attars, incense and spices to European markets. Colonised scents were acceptable when they were subjected to European consumption as luxuries — but it was shameful when colonised people wore them over and over again.
What it means to control a smell
To govern smell is to govern intimacy. Smell is not around; it is on the skin, in the airways, and inside the lungs. The colonial regimes entered into the lives of people at the deepest, personal level by dictating how a city and a body could smell. The British did not sell modernity only by including soap and deodorants, as they were actually demanding assimilation. By deodorising the streets of Algiers, French planners were not only reordering the streets, but they were also separating the population into the sweet and the stinky. Here lies the nasal history of colonisation: an odourless history of deodorisation and fumigation, a stinky stigmatisation.
The scents that linger
The empires exist no more, but their politics of smell still abound. Today cities continue to zone away nuisance trades in neighbourhoods. The prohibition on transitions in public transit is against offensive odours. Advertisement means that perfumes and deodorants continue to declare that modernity is smelly, like chemical freshness and not spices and oils. Stigmatisation of food, communities, or bodies is still propagated through stereotypes concerning the smell of foods, communities, or bodies. Stated differently: the colonial nose did not quite abandon us.
Reclaiming scent
There is another side to this story, though. In the former colonies, perfumes, incense, and oils have been able to withstand the passing of time. The smell of jasmine at a wedding ceremony, of frankincense in a church, of oud in one of the markets — these are modest forms of sustained continuity. They say, ‘We are still here; our smells still are ours.’
Scent can be reclaimed, as history can be reclaimed. To note that smell is not a trivial detail but cultural and political. To understand how the stench of empire was never mere sulphur or soap, but a smack of power, who gives odorous emissions, and who determines who gets to smell what, and how.
Closing note
The colonisation of smell does not feature on the pages of school textbooks, yet it sits in the breeze that we inhale. Empire has been attempting to deodorise, regulate and stigmatise the odours of everyday life. Nonetheless, through the centuries of control, societies retained their perfumes, their spices, and their incense.
When we sniff the smell of sandalwood, rosewater, or cooking spices in the street, we are sensing something more than a scent. We are sniffing resistance — the continuance of cultures that could not be made to please their noses by the imperialists.