Boom, Bugs, Bust: Egypt's Ecology of Interest, 1882–1914

Abstract A century ago, Egypt's British‐run government conscripted thousands of peasant children annually to pick caterpillars from cotton plants. Amidst a double crisis of agro‐ecological degradation and financial collapse, the nationalist movement simultaneously critiqued the exploitation of peasant labor by unproductive foreign finance and endorsed these cotton‐worm campaigns as a national obligation. This article builds upon recent efforts to re‐theorize capitalism as world‐ecology in order to explain this apparently paradoxical position. Rather than frame such confrontations between “society” and “nature” as instances of an elite regime of “techno‐politics”, it argues that both the nationalist critique of foreign capital and the widely felt imperative to wage “war against insects” were features of an “ecology of interest” that multiple waves of financial investment had produced. Egypt's crises provided fodder for anti‐colonial mobilizations. But they also inaugurated a new predicament of developing national capital in a landscape already pillaged as a commodity frontier for empire.