This accompanies Michael Worboys’ British Journal for the History of Science article Imperial Entomology: Boris P. Uvarov and Locusts, c.1920-c.1950

In the spring of 2020, East Africa was affected by two plagues, one modern, one ancient. The modern was COVID-19, the ancient was locusts. Swarms of the Desert Locust (were combatted largely by national agencies, aided by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). In the first half of the twentieth century, locust plagues were managed by imperial governments, advised by their scientific institutions. The most important was the Imperial Bureau of Entomology (IBE) in London. A combination of geography, politics, and scientific authority saw the creation of an ‘imperial entomology’ of locust knowledge and power. British colonies were those most threatened by the plagues, because of the size the formal and informal Empire, but the threats were also an opportunity for the new policy of science-led colonial development. Entomological authority came primarily from Boris Uvarov, a Russian émigré, who worked at the IBE. His phase theory of swarming had revealed that locusts can exist in two forms – solitary and gregarious, and that controlling numbers in the solitary phase could prevent the development of swarms.

Alongside the Desert Locust, British officials and Uvarov’s group were also influential in the study and control of the Red Locust and the African Migratory Locust. With the former, they worked with the governments and scientists of Belgium and South Africa, and with the latter, their French equivalents.

Locust plagues were transnational, requiring international cooperation to research, monitor and control. Such cooperation comes either from the needs of science, or the needs for science. In the former, it is the nature of the subject that demands cooperation, as in meteorology; while in the latter it is the scale and cost of research, as in particle physics. Cooperation with locusts was both of and for science.

Attempts to foster collaboration began through a series of conferences in the 1930s, which focused on encouraging information exchanges in biology and biogeography. After 1936, this continued, but was supplemented by attempts to establish international organisations that would monitor incipient outbreaks and coordinate control measures. British officials anticipated that the renamed Imperial Institute of Entomology (IIE) would be the centre of a three-species, international anti-locust organisation. Political differences stalled progress, but new plagues in the early 1940s and their threat to military operations galvanised action. Cooperation was then achieved on a species-specific regional basis, not the ambitious transcontinental, international organisations previously envisaged. The lead taken by the British military in controls across North and East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, kept Uvarov and the IIE at the centre of research, intelligence, policy, and control operations throughout the Second World War. The strategic and political value of maintaining this position was recognised by the British government in 1945, when it agreed to long-term support for an Anti-Locust Research Centre in London, led by Uvarov. It was a small operation by the standards of post-War ‘Big Science’, but it was large for a dedicated entomological centre and its pre-eminence persisted to the early 1970s.

Read the full open access article

Main image: Photo courtesy of Colin Carlin. See the newspaper Abercornucopia