Insect Safari: Invading Species and Transimperial Science in Kenya

At the turn of the twentieth century, the region that came to be known as Kenya endured two late-imperial biological exchanges, as white settlers and arabica coffee arrived to dominate the politics and economics of the fledgling British colony. The British had high hopes that coffee, in the hands of white settlers, might transform Kenya into a financially viable colony. Yet Kenya also experienced a third biological exchange, the arrival of the coffee mealybug, an insect pest with such a voracious appetite for coffee that it threatened to unravel the settler-colonial project. To halt the infestation, Kenya’s entomologists turned to transimperial scientific networks, traveling to other settler colonies with similar commodities frontiers battling different mealybugs. While they learned a great deal, a solution was eventually found locally. The end result was the successful biological control of the mealybug using yet another insect, a parasitic wasp, that saved Kenya’s coffee industry.