Britain, the Bedouin, and the ‘War on Locusts’: imperialism and internationalism in the 20th Century Middle East

Seminar with historian Prof. Robert Fletcher (University of Missouri).

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, locust swarms surged across the boundaries of the new Middle Eastern mandates. This talk examines how British interest in directing ‘anti-locust’ campaigns made London the centre of global efforts to monitor and eradicate the Desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria), and the wider power, influence, and claims to authority that flowed from its efforts. Driven by British conceptualizations of the locusts’ migrations, inland sites across the Middle East witnessed the arrival of thousands of troops and the development of new infrastructures and legal landscapes of ‘food security’. Yet the search for the insects’ “permanent breeding grounds” – far from the towns and rivers where British power was most confident – also exposed officials’ dependence on Bedouin information and labour. This chapter considers the impact of anti-locust campaigns upon the capacity of regional states to project power into their arid hinterlands and across frontiers and explores how anti-locust work fed into a new round of political conflict over imperial influence, statecraft, and transnational scientific intervention in the era of decolonization.

Bio

Robert S.G. Fletcher is Professor of History and Kinder Professor of British History at the University of Missouri. His research in the fields of imperial and global history focuses on histories of British imperialism, arid environments, nomadic peoples, and maritime exchange. He is the author of British Imperialism and ‘the Tribal Question’: Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919-1936 (Oxford, 2015) and The Ghost of Namamugi: Charles Lenox Richardson and the Anglo-Satsuma War (Amsterdam, 2019), and co-editor of Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: Lives, Linkages, and Imperial Connections (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Connected Empires, Connected Worlds: Essays in Honour of John Darwin (Routledge, 2022).