IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB001567565

Governing Insects in Britain and the Empire, 1691--1816 (2014)

Daston, Lorraine J.
Daston, Lorraine J.
Johns, Adrian
University of Chicago
Jonsson, Fredrik A.
Johns, Adrian
Publication date: 2014
Language: English

ISBN: 9781321225358

Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Advisor: Jonsson, Fredrik A; Committee Members: Johns, Adrian, Daston, Lorraine.
Physical Details: 264 pp.

Outside Links

Insects Science and politics Agricultural technology Entomology Imperialism Great Britain, colonies Environment Great Britain

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.

...More

Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 76/02(E), Aug 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1619357302.

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB001567565

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Drayton, Richard Harry; (2000)
Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (/p/isis/citation/CBB000110698/)

Article Mcaleer, John; (2013)
“Stargazers at the World's End”: Telescopes, Observatories and “Views” of Empire in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320131/)

Article Michael Worboys; (2022)
Imperial entomology: Boris P. Uvarov and locusts, c.1920–c.1950 (/p/isis/citation/CBB324551810/)

Book Antonio Buj Buj; (2016)
Plagas de langosta: de la plaga bíblica a la ciencia de la acridología (/p/isis/citation/CBB035853083/)

Book Jansen, Sarah; (2003)
“Schädlinge”: Geschichte eines wissenschaftlichen und politischen Konstrukts, 1840-1920 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000550607/)

Article Hancock, E. Geoffrey; Brown, Georgina V.; Jowett, Brian; (2011)
Pinned Down: The Role of Pins in the Evolution of Eighteenth Century Museum Insect Collections (/p/isis/citation/CBB001022492/)

Article George, Sam; (2010)
Animated Beings: Enlightenment Entomology for Girls (/p/isis/citation/CBB001032698/)

Article Dmytro Ostapenko; (2018)
Generating New Production Knowledge: Competitive Agricultural Events in the British Australian Colony of Victoria, c.1840–1890 (/p/isis/citation/CBB308479637/)

Article Carissa Chew; (2019)
The Ant as Metaphor: Orientalism, Imperialism and Myrmecology [w. T. Stearn Student Essay] (/p/isis/citation/CBB229368357/)

Book Beattie, James; (2011)
Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art, and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800--1920 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320917/)

Book Cherry, Derelie; (2012)
Alexander Macleay: From Scotland to Sydney (/p/isis/citation/CBB001211174/)

Book Kumar, Deepak; Damodaran, Vinita; D'Souza, Rohan; (2011)
The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201905/)

Article Brittany Merritt; (2017)
Insecurities of Empire: Struggles over health reform in interwar Barbados (/p/isis/citation/CBB808225876/)

Thesis Heuring, Darcy Hughes; (2011)
Health and the Politics of “Improvement” in British Colonial Jamaica, 1914--1945 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001562724/)

Chapter Anna Winterbottom; (2015)
Medicine and Botany in the Making of Madras, 1680-1720 (/p/isis/citation/CBB132574622/)

Chapter James Beattie; (2015)
Plants, Animals and Environmental Transformation: Indian-New Zealand Biological and Landscape Connections, 1830s-1890s (/p/isis/citation/CBB968196475/)

Chapter Alan Lester; (2015)
Introduction: New Imperial and Environmental Histories of the Indian Ocean (/p/isis/citation/CBB500533260/)

Chapter George Adamson; (2015)
Colonial Private Diaries and Their Potential for Reconstructing Historical Climate in Bombay, 1799-1828 (/p/isis/citation/CBB554135680/)

Chapter Deepak Kumar; (2015)
Botanical Explorations and the East India Company: Revisiting "Plant Colonialism" (/p/isis/citation/CBB885700738/)

Chapter Geoff Quiliey; (2015)
"A Proper Set of Views": The British East India Company and the Eighteenth-Century Visualization of South-East Asia (/p/isis/citation/CBB710805844/)