The Locust Fungus: A Global History of Colonial Circulation and Commodification*

This paper examines the collection, cultivation, and distribution of the "locust fungus" in late-nineteenth century South Africa, India, and Argentina. In 1896 an amateur microscopist, Andrew W. Cooper, brought the bodies of locusts infected by a parasitic fungus to the Cape of Good Hope Colonial Bacteriological Institute, hoping that fungi collected from these specimens could be used to destroy locust swarms. Scholars have shown how empires attempted to apply scientific fixes to the problem of colonial pest control in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet these fixes were not always successful. I argue that the locust fungus demonstrates the limitations of the global circulation of science. Laboratory tests and field trials of the fungus across the British Empire and beyond all ended in failure. These setbacks led entomologists and mycologists to question both the efficacy and identity of locust fungus, suggesting that the microorganism lost its virulence when cultivated or was only capable of infecting African locusts. The locust fungus eluded all attempts to deploy it as a biological control. Eventually, a growing consensus emerged that Cooper and staff at the Colonial Bacteriological Institute had accidentally cultivated the wrong species of fungus.