Governing Insects in Britain and the Empire, 1691-1816

Governing Insects in Britain and the Empire offer an environmental, political, and intellectual history of insect control during the "long" eighteenth century. Histories of insect knowledge and control, written largely by entomologists themselves, invariably begin in the late nineteenth century, when state entomologists appeared for the first time in the United States. However, the imperative to control insectile nature has a much longer and more widely influential history than these volumes lead us to believe. This imperative gained significant momentum in Britain and the Empire over the course of the eighteenth century, sustained by the persistent optimism of late seventeenth-century natural theology and reinforced by the intense political force of enlightenment improvement politics. British agriculturalists and naturalists began to see insects differently; these little animals transformed from a remote and occult instrument of divine vengeance to a proximate and knowable force of nature that could be battled through God-given, yet human, ingenuity.