by Minke Hijmans
“Climate change” may evoke vaguely threatening graphics. Blazing hills against a violent orange sky. The cracked, clay earth of a dried-up lake. A lazy smog cloud draped over an anonymous urban skyline. These visuals, often deployed in media coverage, are of an abstract, liminal, apocalyptic “absence.” They depict a violent “emptying” of local and global lifeworlds in terms that are both viscerally horrific and comfortably impersonal. Industrialized plantation landscapes that house and enact this “absence,” however, are generally familiar. They may even be welcoming. The images of green pastureland with grazing cows or a field of corn are not often catastrophized. Neither is the image of driving on a forest road, appreciated through a clean car windshield.
In the first image, you are most likely seeing ryegrass, the most widely used forage grass in temperate pasturelands. Their agricultural and economic success is aided by certain species of Epichloëwho are employed in a symbiotic fungal infection. This fungal endophyte increases host grass competitiveness and protects against a range of biotic and abiotic stresses, notably including insect predation. The second image is a cash crop established as an impossible monoculture. It relies on water-intensive agricultural methods and very likely requires (artificial) fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides to manage nonhuman competition and compensate for its inability to sustain life, let alone the production demanded from it. In the third, you are seeing what 50 years ago would not have been possible. In fact, even in my 28 years of life, the image of insects on car windshields is vivid only in early memories of family road trips. Different estimates have suggested that between 75% and 98% of insect biomass—that is at minimum three-quarters of insect biomass—has been lost in the past 35 years. The existential threat this poses cannot be overstated. Insects provide food, natural predation, nutrient recycling, pollination, and more. They are “integral to every terrestrial food web,” including our own, meaning in no uncertain terms that without insects, “terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems will collapse.” (R967) There is a consensus that the factors responsible include the loss of biodiversity, disruption of stable weather patterns, and the targeted eradication of insect “pests” in commercial agriculture. These factors are all either a tool or collateral in global-market, industrialized agricultural systems that grow the majority of the food we eat. Those ryegrass pasturelands and endless cornfields instrumentalize the violent “emptying” that the term “climate change” envelopes. These landscapes cater to human capitalist imaginaries and seek to excise the beings who author them. They feed and are fed by “absence.”
Crucially, these capitalist landscapes are rooted in histories of empire. Exposing their logic requires comprehending the ways in which colonial projects planted their political and economic ideologies into physical soils, converting vast tracts of land into exploitative factory fields. It also necessitates conversing with those who resist it. Insects contested colonial re-ordering by (re)claiming and consuming plantation landscapes. They posed a serious and increasing threat to the viability of extractive imperial projects, so that significant research, labor, and time were devoted to their eradication. Insects feature in a longue-durée history where state, science, and capital work to establish a violent agro-economic praxis, valorizing “productivity” and vilifying its adversaries. This praxis created the “insect-enemy.” This figure informed and rationalized imperial agricultural aspirations. The “insect-enemy” was able to accommodate bizarre paradoxes, where insects could be both fetishized objects and dangerous agents. This piece explores thoughts on and about insects in an earlynineteenth-century entomological text. It serves as a proxy analysis for European imperial insect imaginaries more broadly and is woven into a longue-durée intellectual history of global-market agricultural capitalism.
An Introduction to Entomology (1815) is the first of a seminal four-volume series written by William Kirby and William Spence. The work contains a series of personal letters addressed to the reader, offering fascinating insights into the socio-political, religious, and economic aspirations of these nineteenth-century entomologists. The pair was somewhat of Schrödinger’s-authorship, as both chose not to explicate intellectual ownership over their letters, only providing a general overview alongside later editions to assuage curious readers. This is intriguing; as outlined by J. M. F. Clark, their co-authorship was often one of ideological tension. Kirby—a parson-naturalist—distanced himself from Spence’s more secular tone, particularly when it came to discussions on “instinct” and “intelligence.” Spence, a political economist, adopted a more “liberal position that conflicted with Kirby’s Hutchinsonian beliefs.” (55) In a letter outlining the division of authorship, Spence presses his and Kirby’s desire that “in any reference to our work we may be always jointly referred to” (barring two exceptions). (311) Clark, however, cautions that glossing over or essentializing their ideological differences mischaracterizes the heterogenous and often ambiguous position that natural theology occupied “within the spectrum of heated politico-religious debate” at the time. (55) Untangling their respective positionality is beyond the scope of this essay. However, it is important to note that this paper engages with insect theology in ways that often counter Spence’s more secular praxis. In fact, Clark notes that some of Spence’s epistemological alliances “placed him in league with radical reformers and emergent evolutionists—and at odds with William Kirby.” (44) For this reason, while I primarily cite both authors, I credit Kirby in those instances where his thought foundationally diverges from that of Spence.
In the preface to this first volume, the authors proclaim that “Entomology now divides the empire with her sister, Botany.” (vi) Botany oversaw the “division” of empire in profound ways, seeking novel sources of wealth and methods to maximize profitability. The assertion that entomology formed a colonial sisterhood together with botany is both a testament to the entanglement of their “objects” and a striking insight into their aligned political aspirations. At the same time, it underscores significant obstacles. The “division of empire” was an economic project, and so entomology had to supply and inform imperial wealth. Where plants were more explicitly commodifiable, insects were not only seen as less so; they threatened the profitability of vegetal assets. Worse still, the authors lament how these beings were socially imagined as ill-omens; close to “non-entities,” sometimes invisible by virtue of their size or camouflage, entirely too visible through their inflicted “injuries,” or generally mischaracterized by the “vulgar errors” (superstitions) of common citizens. These pesky, living, inanimate, active, symbolic agent-objects were, in many ways, unstable vessels for the political and social aspirations of imperial entomology. This motivated a fascinating reordering of insect imaginaries, with both authors seeking to both imbue the insect object with a “noble,” even “moral” message, enamoring others to their study while at the same time positioning them to secure imperial wealth.
To serve the first, the authors emphasize the joy of insect collecting. Insects are presented as “objects” of exceptional worth, rivaling those in “higher orders” and providing an “inexhaustible wealth” of pleasure for those seeking novelty. (vii, 7) Kirby’s insects are divine symbols, bearing religious iconography on their bodies. (10-11) They are revered as “nature’s favorite production,” embodying “all that is either beautiful or graceful, interesting and alluring, or curious and singular.” (7) Kirby also describes insects as symbolic “evil demons,” “impure spirits,” and jarringly, “the enemies of man” (12). These minute “dispensers of punishment” are the foot soldiers of divine wrath (81-82). He notes that Linnaeus, too, must have seen this when naming insects “Beelzebub, Belial, Titan, Typhon, Nimrod, Geryon, and the like.” (12) The harm insects inflict on human vegetal and animal “possessions” are described in detail, with reference to their “attacks” on cows, peas, wheat, deer, dogs, and rye. (164) Perhaps most notably, insects are branded as citizens of an earthly, nonhuman “universal empire,” able to subjugate all life on earth. All those who “possess or [have] possessed animal or vegetal life,” including “even the authority of imperial man,” are “destined to be the food of these next to nonentities.” (82-83) As inanimate objects in the pursuit of pleasure and religious piety, insects are fetishized. In their agency, insects are feared and vilified. Throughout, insects are precarious agent-objects, imbued with human stories of devils and angels, profits and power, morality and vulgarity; commodities and the pests who ravage them.
Even this unstable image, however, is further shaken. These insect object-agents are also “not only … alive themselves, [they] confer animation on the leaves, fruits, and flowers they inhabit.” (xvi) We are reminded that insects confer with plants. What is explicated here is that they confer animation on the bodies of plants. While I understand that this definition of animation is likely closer to “vitality” or “movement” than it is to consciousness and being, this remains a fascinating complicator to this colonial imaginary. Insects make visible lifeworlds in what should be among the “lowest,” most inanimate orders. They destroy while simultaneously animating capital: what a fascinating paradox! This crisis of insect agent-objects poses a challenge to fantasies of human dominance in more profound ways than simply through consuming imperial profits. Insects threaten the anthropocentric fallacy that rationalizes “mastery” over “flora’s empire.”
The authors exclaim that insects “humble” the conceptions of human superiority. This idea was not new. Twenty years earlier, German theologian Friedrich Christian Lesser, in his book Insecto-Theology (abbreviated title), writes: “To mention only the army of insects, how many means can he not employ to humble the pride of weak mortals!” (53) Less than a century earlier, Dutch entomologist J. C. Sepp prefaced his book, Beschouwing der wonderen Gods, in de minstgeachte schepzelen: Nederlandsche insecten, (Contemplating the wonders of God in the least esteemed creatures: Dutch insects, abbreviated title) with a poem by J. J. van Rensselaar (self-translated): “The man, however perfectly created as the (centerpiece/showpiece) of all animals / loses his (pride/arrogance) in the [insect] mirror.” (3) Kirby and Spence echo this belief but add that insects humble our “production.” “Man thinks that he stands unrivaled as an architect and that his buildings are without a parallel among the works of the inferior orders of animals. He would be of a different opinion did he attend to the history of insects.” (14) They describe the desirability of Tyrian dye before introducing us to leafcutter bees, who hang their walls “with tapestry of a scarlet more brilliant than any [human] rooms can exhibit.” (15) They remind us that bees and wasps have known how to “make and apply” paper “superior in substance and polish to any we can produce.” (15) Spiders construct diving bells and air-pumps more “ingenious” than our own. Caterpillars use nothing but their bodies as pistons. Ants create metropoles rivaling the numbers of “imperial Rome, Pekin, or Babylon.” (16) They exclaim that these “minims of nature” are “endowed with instincts in many cases superior to all our boasted powers of intellect.” (18) This can easily be dismissed as excessively poetic exclamations to promote a field without meaningfully questioning the logic it is predicated on. But this remains noteworthy. However flawed, there is a whispered, faint, spectral attempt at a horizontal orientation where insects become agents of knowledge. For a moment, insect lifeworlds are animate. They are evolving and intelligent, and for an even briefer moment, we are urged to speak with them. Yet this is short-lived. Kirby clarifies that imagining insects in their more-than-human glory is vital so we may better contemplate the glory of God. They quickly return to objecthood: vessels of a divine knowledge over which they hold no authorship.
What remains true, however, is that insects disrupt the implications of their insignificance. They reflect back a fallacy embedded in particular colonial-capitalist notions of power by questioning who wields it. This discomfort is remedied in Christian rhetoric, exemplified by Kirby, and saturating much of European entomology well into the twentieth century. Insects, as God’s creations, humble us not through their own might but as divinely deployed legions in the armies of providence. No foundations are rattled, no worldviews are shaken; no insect can truly humble—let alone speak—to “man.” But here, the paradox deepens. Of course, mounting an all-out assault on God’s (and profligates’) plan is unconscionable, so insects must be both divine and profane to reconcile our (growing) fear of this rival invertebrate empire. This contradiction is reconciled with notions of natural “balance.”
For Kirby, insects’ lives constitute a complex chain of affinities that must be “maintained in those relative proportions necessary for the general good of the system.” (19) While Kirby does not explicitly use the word “balance,” the term aptly captures a key feature of his thought: The diversity of (insect) life collapses into a grand system, whose function is indelible proof of divine intelligence. This system is one of “counterchecks,” orchestrated by an “unseen hand [that] holds the reins, now permitting one to prevail and now another.” If “one species for a while preponderate … [the system may] reduce it within its due limits … [to] effect the purposes for which they were created and never exceed their commission.” (19) F. C. Lesser similarly writes that insects, while “necessary to a certain degree, their excess is always pernicious.” (53) He claims that God would “not permit them to multiply beyond their proper bounds” and further pacifies any anxieties by proclaiming that only for sinners are they “turned to evil.” Aside from the overtly religious underpinnings, these views are not dissimilar to how we understand insects today: indispensable specialists within vast, complex, relational, (nonhuman) ecological webs. Importantly, this system maintains itself through the “incessant … conflict between its component parts.” (19) Balance, in other words, is a perpetual, cyclical war. This is a foundational facet of European insect imaginaries. It reverberates throughout its history along shapeshifting terms: “Nature,” as a singular |wonderous whole,” relies on a cyclical conflict between a diversity of component-lives to uphold its “true,” “healthy,” and even “moral” state. Those who populate these ecologies often become utilitarian legions within these imagined landscapes. And those able to define and deploy “balance” ultimately govern the lives of its soldiers.
Kirby and Spence similarly contemplate the politics of balance. But in branding these “non-entities” as colonial rivals, this natural “balance” becomes notably weaponized:
When any species multiplies upon us, so as to become noxious, we certainly have a just right to destroy it, and what means can be more proper than those which Providence itself has furnished? We can none of us go further or do more than the Divine Will permits; and he will take care that our efforts shall not be injurious to the general welfare, or effect the annihilation of any individual species. (39)
For these authors, the destruction of insect “excess” is divinely sanctioned and justly enforced. Human-mediated oppression in the service of balance is not only necessary but also noble. Moreover, it could purportedly never truly harm insect welfare, let alone lead to their annihilation. As we read these words 200 years later, during Earth’s sixth mass extinction, the foreshadowing they offer us is poignantly devastating.
Allied under a banner of patriarchalism and agricultural improvement, both Kirby and Spence struggle within an epistemological crisis, firmly wedged in histories of economic entomology; the desirability of insect-objecthood is at odds with the destructive nature of the insect agent. The authors anchor their remedy to the “insect-enemy:” a figure who rationally separates insect-objects from insect-agents by distinguishing between (scientific, economic, social) capital and those who harm it. Insect-objects operate within a harmonious, balanced, imaginary landscape, penned by fantasies of divinely sanctioned, infinite wealth extraction. The insect-enemy threatens to unbalance this vision, fueling the rationale of imperial-capitalist aspirations. Insect enemies are villains in Arcadia.
In the decades following Kirby’s Introduction to Entomology, pesticide research became increasingly central to the discipline, which experienced a distinct economic turn as it entered the twentieth century. This was largely informed by emerging methods of industrialized violence and military entomological alliances. Both World Wars notably catalyzed an explosion in chemical pesticide use, and eradicating the “insect-enemy” from agro-capitalist landscapes became both a patriotic duty and an economic necessity.
In monocultural planting systems, asymmetrical relationships—enforced or otherwise—are magnified in ways that threaten capital. The “deployment” of “balance” in these contexts is an economic tool to rationally besiege nonhuman “enemies.” It imagines nonhuman lifeworlds as foundationally informed by endless conflict, justifies human violence as “natural,” and violently polices nonhuman citizenry. Balance desires a spatial stasis and rationally denies that diversity, transformation, relationality, and negotiation form and inform viable lifeworlds. By sanctioning and obscuring its own violence, it calls into being those ryegrass pasturelands and endless cornfields. This “balance,” more than anything, has been the author of “absence.”
If we relieve the “insect-enemy” of this political caricature, these beings teach us an indispensable lesson. They often navigate landscapes-of-absence in ways that markedly parallel our own. They expose what it means to commodify and rupture relationships we all grow and are grown from. When we fetishize consumption that is predicated on a happy fantasy of singular “ownership” over endless “resources,” we feed an impossible illusion. This is as true for humans as it is for weevils, root flies, nematodes, apple moths, potato beetles, and others who consume these spaces. Landscapes of infinite profit and the politics of “absence” cannot sustain anyone, as these fields can never sustain themselves. Here, however, the parallels end. Nonhuman consumption destroys these fetishized landscapes. They might disperse the seeds of their meal so these spaces can negotiate a diversity of life again. They may travel to re-learn languages of relational ecosystems and mediate lives for themselves and others elsewhere. Or they may fertilize soils with their own bodies if there is nothing left to eat. In contrast—mobilized against the “insect-enemy” and brandishing the logic of profitable “balance”—human capitalism loads its weaponry, plants its grasslands, ploughs open the cornfield, and deploys its fantasy again.
Minke Hijmans is a PhD researcher with the School of History at the University of St Andrews. She holds an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and a Master Of Letters in Global Social and Political Thought. Her MLitt dissertation focused on “acting-with” plants in gardened spaces, “re-gardening” the legacies of empire. Her doctoral project traverses a global intellectual history of capitalist agriculture, enveloped by a story of two botanic gardens in India and Indonesia. Minke’s research interests include nonhuman (global) intellectual histories, environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and any broadly creative, interdisciplinary research that critically imagines more viable futures.
Edited by Artur Banaszewski
Featured Image: Merian, M. S. (1705). Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium […]. Public domain. Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage LIbrary, via Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.
