Seeing Stench: Identity and Odour in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century Anti-Scottish Discourse

Odours are often perceived as socially binary, non-visual markers of identity and status, and thereby linked to morality. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland, Enlightenment texts identified bodily odours, as well as skin colour, as signs of moral and racial degeneration. Beyond sight, smell provided a language of disgust that supported assumptions of inferiority or backwardness. After the 1707 Act of Union, English portrayals of Scotland continued to present the country (and its people) as inferior through its odours. Often imagined or implied rather than materially present, odours were associated with spaces as symbols of their backwardness. Scotland is not unique in this; the British engaged in extensive olfactory othering across the globe. However, the liminal space that Scotland occupied meant that identity was in flux during this period; olfactory disgust was projected onto social practices, bodies, and spaces to reinforce prejudices and assumptions that the country was distinct from England. This process was not wholly one-sided, with Scottish residents both reclaiming and rejecting these ascribed olfactory differences; this article argues that odour served as a means of negotiating Scottish identity at multiple levels within a post-union context.