3rd World Congress of Environmental History

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The ‘Gravity of the Menace’ from the Temperate to the Tropical: The British Mosquito Control Institute and the Challenge of the Indigenous Mosquito, 1920-39

Wed, July 24, 11:00am to 12:30pm, Centro de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas (CFH), Sala 301 do CFH

Abstract

After the late 19th century demise of ague (marsh fever), a native strain of malaria, it seems like mosquitos and mosquito-related illnesses disappear from British history. But after visiting the coastal resort of Hayling Island, Hampshire - where an upsurge in (non-malarial Aedes detritus) mosquito numbers in 1920 triggered a vigorous local response - pioneering malariologist Ronald Ross reported that the mosquitos there were worse than anything he had encountered in the West Indies.

Though involving mosquitos that were mostly bothersome rather than potentially fatal, this paper locates this specific period of renewed human-mosquito conflict in Britain within a wider geographical and conceptual framework of English language mosquito studies (Marcus Hall [Sardinia], Margaret Jones [Jamaica], John McNeill [Caribbean], Timothy Mitchell [Egypt], Emily O’Gorman [Australia] and Paul Sutter [Central America]).

This Hayling Island case study provides a springboard to examine various North-South convergences: intersections between local and wider colonial perceptions and experiences of mosquitos; the shared ground (ideological and material) of control and eradication strategies and techniques; the knowledge networks linking a mosquito control institute in a southern English seaside town with the mosquito’s tropical haunts; and the overlap between interwar Britain’s mosquito-related anxieties (the ‘gravity of the menace’ [Hogarth, British Mosquitoes & How to Eradicate Them (1928)]) and those associated with recent wetland expansion/reinstatement to mitigate climate change impacts (specifically, concerns that Britain’s five varieties capable of carrying malaria might become active carriers and that malarial mosquitoes become naturalized).

Shaped by more-than-human, relational perspectives in the humanities and social sciences, and drawing on archival research for a multi-disciplinary project, ‘Taking the bite out of wetlands: Managing mosquitoes and the socio-ecological value of wetlands for wellbeing’ (a collaboration with Public Health England’s medical entomologists), this paper investigates mosquito co-authorship and mosquito ecology in an unlikely and overlooked but unexpectedly insightful place.

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