Beyond Eradication: Global Entomological Narratives

Most histories of entomology have analyzed insect eradication strategies in Europe, the U.K. and the U.S.A. This session brings together scholars conducting new research on twentieth-century entomology in multiple places, many of them settler societies: provincial China, U.S.S.R., Malaysia, Kenya and Argentina. These studies reveal how insect population management was entangled with new visions of anthropogenic ‘natural’ and agricultural landscapes, pastoral indigenous peoples’ perceptions and activities, and the development of global networks of like-minded entomologists. Alejandro Martinez analyzes perceptions of ‘natural’ insect control as part of creating ‘balanced’ ecological landscapes in early-20th century Argentina. Yubin Shen explores the multi-national network of entomologists (mostly U.S.-China) that created the Jiangsu Provincial Bureau of Entomology in the 1920s. Sabine Clark tells the story of cautiously-applied locust control measures in Kenya after 1945, highlighting Kenyan herdsmen’s concerns about their cattle being poisoned. Marin Coudreau analyzes the entanglement of insect management regimes with militarized forced migrations and state management of the agricultural peasantry in the late Russian empire-early Soviet Union. Aaron Van Neste details an entomologist's importation of the African palm weevil from Cameroon to Malaysia as a palm-tree pollinator in the 1970s-80s, and the novel multi-species ecologies and labor histories that were generated as a result. Together these five case studies show how both non-scientific workers and global networks of entomologists helped to shape (and sometimes subverted) visions and transformations of natural and agricultural landscapes in South America, Africa, eastern Europe and Asia.