Nature's agents or agents of empire? Entomological workers and environmental change during the construction of the Panama Canal.

This essay examines the role that entomological workers played in U.S. public health efforts during the construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914). Entomological workers were critical to mosquito control efforts aimed at the reduction of tropical fevers such as malaria. But in the process of studying vector mosquitoes, they discovered that many of the conditions that produced mosquitoes were not intrinsic to tropical nature per se but resulted from the human-caused environmental disturbances that accompanied canal building. This realization did not mesh well with an American ideology of tropical triumphalism premised on the notion that the Americans had conquered unalloyed tropical nature in Panama. The result, however, was not a coherent counternarrative but a set of intra-administrative tensions over what controlling nature meant in Panama. Ultimately, entomological workers were loyal not just to the U.S. imperial mission in Panama but also to a modernist culture of science and to the workings of mosquito ecology as they understood them.