In the early twentieth century, an official at the US Department of the Interior published an essay in Harper's Magazine warning that “the insects are winning” the thousand-year war between humans and their six-legged adversaries (William Atherton DuPuy, “The Insects Are Winning,” March 1925). The future of the human race, DuPay claimed, depended on humans mounting an aggressive counteroffensive. As Edward Melillo writes in this lively book, The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World, humans have done so, but that “our victories to date have been Pyrrhic. They may turn out to be suicidal, for without insects, it will be extremely difficult to sustain human life on planet Earth” (176). Insects often were, and are, seen in history and contemporary life as threats—they are invaders of homes, fields, and bodies, capable of inflecting damage, loss, and death—and scholars have been attentive to insects’ role in spreading disease like yellow fever and in devastating agricultural output. Melillo offers a different perspective, outlining instead the “productive relationships between insects and people” in the past and the continuing “and unexpected human dependencies” (4) on insects in modern life.

To do that, Melillo focuses on a series of case studies, organized into two sections. In the first section, he sketches a cultural and economic history of humans and insects. Melillo traces some insect products whose uses have faded over time, such as bee honey as a sweetener (replaced by sugar) and iron gall ink, which comes from a wasp larvae secretion on a certain kind of oak tree, and which was used to pen the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and The Magic Flute, among other notable works. His main focus, however, is on three specific insect-derived products and their uses, past and present: shellac, silk, and cochineal. The fortunes of each followed the same general trajectory: a local resource was discovered by outsiders, entered into broader, eventually global, networks of exchange, and enjoyed widespread use until the middle of the twentieth century, when it was replaced by a new, synthetic substitute for a period of time between roughly the 1940s and the 1970s. Then, importantly, it became clear that better living did not necessarily come from chemistry. More recent decades witnessed a revival of old uses and the emergence of new ones as scientists and consumers came to realize that synthetic products could not mirror the qualities of natural insect-derived materials and that the former often had toxic side effects. Shellac, the secretion from the scale insect Kerria Lacca common in India, provides a good example. Long used as a varnish on furniture and instruments, and it also became the medium through which recorded music was first distributed widely in the early twentieth century. Although vinyl ultimately replaced shellac records and synthetic varnishes emerged, shellac has reemerged in recent decades. It now coats internal medicines and the outside of fruits, is used in nail polish and hair sprays, is an ingredient in dentures and tooth fillings, and has returned as a wood varnish for select consumers. “The persistence of seemingly premodern means of production,” Melillo argues, “exposes cracks in the smooth edifice of technological modernity” (8). He does a particularly nice job tracing the historical process and routes by which these various local resources became global commodities.

Part two offers three case studies of how insects have influenced what Melillo calls “hives of modernity” (9): science, agribusiness, and sustainable food consumption. Melillo highlights the central role of fruit flies in a number of scientific developments, including breakthroughs in genetics and more recently, our understanding of circadian rhythms. He notes that research involving fruit flies has resulted in eight Nobel Prizes spread among eighteen scientists as of 2018. Another chapter details the importance of insects as pollinators in world food production. Melillo discusses both scientists who pioneered research on bees, including Charles Henry Turner, the first African American to publish in the journal Science, and the threats to bee populations and other pollinators today. His last chapter explores human consumption of insects in different parts of the world. Entomophagy has not been as common in Europe and North America as elsewhere, perhaps because neither was home to a large number of edible insects. Nevertheless, he suggests the aversion to eating insects may be changing in the West as more people come to embrace “six-legged gastronomy” (154) as a sustainable source of protein. He points to shifts in European attitudes about potatoes and Japanese attitudes about meat as historical examples of such dietary transformations.

Throughout, Melillo is an engaging guide to the world of insects, past and present. He explains scientific information about insects clearly for non-specialists, provides good historical context for the developments he discusses, and has an eye for the engaging anecdote. Indeed, the book is filled with interesting information and asides. Who knew that Thomas Edison was the first to talk about a “bug” in an electrical system? Or who knew the amazing story of Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menoville, a French lawyer and eco-pirate who secretly journeyed across Mexico in 1777 to steal cochineal and break Spain's monopoly on the red dye? (He managed to get the insects back to Saint-Domingue but died shortly thereafter). Some of Melillo's material concerns Britons and the British Empire at various points, but this is really a global history. He talks briefly about the failed effort to develop silk in early colonial Virginia, but surprisingly does not mention South Carolina, which exported some silk for several decades in the eighteenth century before the industry collapsed. Regardless, Melillo has written a highly readable introduction to the role of insects in history and modern life, one that would fit well into a variety of undergraduate classes in environmental or global history.