Information Territory and Data Terrains: an examination of the Anti-Locust Research Centre

This article examines a science-policy interface from the age of empire. Focusing on the ‘Anti-Locust Research Centre’ (ALRC), the British Empire's pioneering attempt to monitor and eradicate locusts and protect colonial agriculture, the article approaches the ALRC as an information system, exploring its origins in the 1920s to its heyday in the 1950s. It argues for the value in distinguishing between the organisation's ‘information territory’ – the domain in which its claims of knowledge were made – and its ‘data terrains’ – the material environments and experiences from which its data was gathered. Through a combination of archival research and original data visualisations, the article examines the place of the ALRC and its archive within conceptions of space, the working of data, the exercise of power, and the histories of colonialism and war. Doing so allows us to interrogate contemporary claims about the extent and capacity of the ALRC's performance, and to reveal the multiple spatial and temporal obstacles that constrained its ambitions. With an eye to debates about science-policy interfaces today, it uses the ALRC story to reflect on how territories and terrains wholly outside the experience of locusts themselves affected its judgements, forecasts, and operations.