Abstract Summary
Invasive insect species became a constant preoccupation of agricultural officials in the U.S.-governed Territory of Hawaii during the early twentieth century. Biological control constituted the primary means of pest control at the time, and the territory’s Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry regularly deployed entomologists to distant parts of the world in order to collect and introduce insect parasites that could keep populations on unwanted insects in check. This paper examines two such expeditions—Filipo Silvestri’s 1912-13 search for parasites in west Africa to combat the Mediterranean fruit fly, and David T. Fullaway’s effort to find melon fly parasites in south and southeast Asia in 1914-15—in order to understand the inter-imperial networks that undergirded tropical agriculture as a disciplinary formation of empire. The history of entomological expeditions and biological pest control in Hawai‘i speaks to the trans-Pacific and global ecological relationships that conditioned imperial agriculture and governance during the era of high imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
