Colonial Medicine and the Empire of Insects

Abstract

Much has been written about the importance of bacteriology in early twentieth-century colonial medicine. There has been less study of the role of other ‘tropical sciences’, including entomology. I examine the development of applied entomology in the British Empire in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In 1913, the Imperial Bureau of Entomology was established (from 1933: the Imperial Institute of Entomology). The control of invasive insects and arthropods - including caterpillars, locusts, aphids, and mosquitoes - became central, not only to the management of colonial agriculture, but to the maintenance of colonial health. Concentrating, in particular, on India and British Malaya during a period of rapid environmental transformation, the paper explores the extent to which investigations into the life histories and bionomics of insect pests intersected with developments in colonial parasitology to produce a new awareness of disease ecologies and recognition of the limitations of biological control.