Uncontrollable Pests: Agricultural Warfare in 20th-Century Egypt

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Egypt’s crops, and therefore its wealth, came under attack from a series of insect “pests”. Ships passing through the Suez Canal brought with them voracious cotton worms, while locust swarms invaded from the north and south. Against these unwelcome intruders, the colonial state had the same reply: it called up hundreds of thousands of rural peasants each year, to kill the insect pests by hand. However, these were not sustainable solutions. The colonial state could ill afford to direct such large numbers of peasant conscripts away from other forms of agricultural work.

Thus, colonial administrators turned to entomologists. These representatives of a novel branch of science reshaped Egyptian agriculture, introducing a whole host of techniques to repel, control, and destroy insect pests, with varying levels of success. They imported insects, birds, and reptiles that they hoped would prey on the insects that preyed on Egypt’s crops. They also introduced projects that annually fumigated millions of trees, distributed poisons to peasants on unprecedented scales, and even tried to use flame throwers to destroy locusts. The poisons failed to stop the insects, but they did succeed in raising human on human murder rates. They also spread novel forms of disease across the countryside.

Despite a litany of projects to control insect pests, peasant laborers remained more effective than any technology until the 1970s. Consequently, forced labor continued well into the postcolonial era in Egypt. To follow entomologists as they went from one failure to the next, this paper relies on the writings of the scientists themselves, from their field notes to their published work. By turning to this dispersed archive, it explores how scientists forged novel connections between labor and the state over the twentieth century.