The first paper explores the history of bilharzia (schistosomiasis) in modern Iraq, demonstrating how the disease’s entrenchment was not merely a medical crisis but a product of British colonial hydraulic interventions. By reshaping the Tigris-Euphrates riverine landscape, these projects enabled the spread of freshwater snails, the disease’s intermediary hosts, linking disease control efforts to broader patterns of labor, governance, and ecological management. This paper interrogates how disease mitigation efforts reinforced new forms of colonial authority while erasing non-human agency from technocratic discourse. The second paper examines forestry concessions on the Ottoman Island of Thasos, where state efforts to privatize and exploit natural resources met resistance from local communities who framed their struggle in ecological terms. Islanders contested the commodification of forests by invoking the significance of bees, arguing that deforestation would disrupt apiaries and their livelihood. By foregrounding the non-human in this environmental dispute, this paper illuminates how local actors strategically mobilized ecological knowledge to resist imperial economic extraction, demonstrating the role of indigenous expertise in shaping governance.

The third paper addresses the persistence of animal acclimatization programs in 20th-century America, countering dominant narratives that frame such efforts as a failed 19th-century phenomenon. Through the case of Nelson Gardiner Bump and the Foreign Game Introduction Program, this paper examines how state-sponsored wildlife management sought to engineer nature for economic and recreational purposes, often with disastrous ecological consequences. By analyzing the discourse of expertise within these programs, the paper critiques the hubris of technocratic governance in the face of ecological unpredictability. The final paper investigates the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) as a site of scientific negotiation within the British Empire. Founded in 1916, the ZSI sought to establish an “indigenous” zoology that diverged from Euro-American evolutionary frameworks, asserting that local ecological pressures necessitated unique classificatory methods. This paper challenges colonial science historiographies that assume a rigid colonizer-colonized binary, instead illustrating how scientific institutions operated within a global yet hierarchical knowledge economy. Collectively, these papers demonstrate how science, environmental governance, and non-human agency have historically intersected in ways that reinforced but also challenged imperial authority. By centering both human and non-human actors in histories of science and governance, this panel offers new perspectives on the entanglements of expertise, power, and ecological change in the modern era.