Washing layers of bug guts from your windshield was part of any long-distance drive just a few decades ago. Not anymore. The widespread collapse of insect populations is of grave concern to scientists, even if most non-specialists shrug at the decline in bug numbers.Footnote ¹ People’s indifference to the disappearance of creepy, crawly, splattering critters is easy to understand, but hard to justify. Six-legged invertebrates are central to processes that historians customarily describe in human terms: pollinating crops and producing silk, transmitting disease and making honey. Individual bugs may be tiny, but they are collectively enormous, accounting for at least three times as much biomass as humans.Footnote ²

Despite their economic, ecological, and physical heft, insects have largely escaped the attention of scholars in the humanities. This collection is thus cause for celebration among specialists in East Asian studies, science and technology studies, and animal studies. The editors explain in the introduction that this volume was inspired “in part by the pressing issues of catastrophic climate change and massive species loss” (xxi). While the chapters do not directly address these unnatural disasters, the collection demonstrates the necessity of multispecies perspectives for understanding technological innovation, social turmoil, and political power. A multilingual glossary helps readers to grasp the terminology in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The robust bibliography, with characters, is a helpful guide to the relevant literature of this burgeoning field. Writing across millennia and over a vast land mass, the editors state forthrightly that they are not trying to cover everything, but to examine a few topics more closely (xv).

The book features three thematic sections. The first involves “conceptual categorization” of insects and other creepy critters known as chóng 蟲. Olivia Milburn’s extraordinary chapter, “The Masculine Bee: Gendering Insects in Chinese Imperial-Era Literature,” traces Chinese scholars’ dogged attempts to fit honeybees into familiar gender categories and roles, notwithstanding the insects’ physiological and social differences from humans. In several charming excerpts, poets rhapsodize about bees’ perceived selflessness and loyalty to their “king,” with some even taking the hierarchy and regimentation of beehives as a model for people to emulate. In texts including A Record of the Transformations of Yin and Yang, literati distorted apian biology on a procrustean bed of political commitments and gender norms. Yet they were also sensitive to the intelligence of individual bees, describing the insects as “investigat[ing] where they could live at peace … [,] fix[ing] on a location where they can prepare for troubles” (26). This rewarding chapter not only illuminates the uneasy commingling of social norms and empirical observations. It also shows how keenly many people felt joy and even humility in studying insects. Today’s bug-blindness is historically anomalous. Federico Valenti’s chapter, “What Did it Take to Be a Chong?: Profile of a Polysemous Character in Early China,” shows how the title character served as a catch-all label for creatures that did not fit neatly into other categories. His findings challenge the historical linguist Michael Carr’s position that increasing precision in the definition of chóng was necessarily contingent on a “relative semantic contraction” in the meaning of zhì 豸 or “beast” (10).

The second group of essays deals with the relations between insects and state power. Here the materiality of the animals occupies the foreground. The authors explain how bugs such as locusts, silkworms, and mosquitoes participated in campaigns of crop protection, textile production, and public hygiene in Qing China, colonial Korea, and postwar Japan, respectively. These chapters add significant multispecies dimensions to our understanding of governance and environmental history. Kerry Smith’s “‘Lives without Mosquitoes and Flies’: Eradication Campaigns in Postwar Japan,” for example, shows how killing harmful bugs helped bring people together in “communal action and communal solidarity” (148).

Extending the insights of his seminal monograph,Footnote ³ David A. Bello’s chapter, “Locusts Made Simple: Holding Humans Responsible for Insect Behavior in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century China,” shows how Qing officials organized people to tamp down outbreaks of ravenous locusts in the scrupulously developed croplands that formed an ideal habitat for the unwelcome insects. While the author avoids sentimental anthropomorphism, he demonstrates how the actions of hungry insects “fundamentally informed … human behavior” (67). Judicious use of scientific literature allows the author to make well-grounded claims about the agency of insects in their complex relationships with people.

Integrating more of the findings of modern entomology, as Bello does, would have helped some other chapters to treat insects as subjects, rather than simply as objects. The editors acknowledge that scientific neglect has made insects among the most “data deficient” of animals (xxviii). Furthermore, cross-species empathy is an even more daunting step than when researching mammals. Historians have plausibly examined the mental and emotional experiences of “charismatic” creatures such as wolves and cows.Footnote ⁴ Insects are far more inscrutable to human observers. With their compound eyes, decentralized nervous systems, and astonishing strength and agility, they often seem like terrestrial aliens. Yet scientific insights into insects’ behavior and cognition can help to bridge the interspecies chasm. As Bello rightly contends, “entomological literature is a prerequisite for decentering humans in historical analysis of their mutual relations” (91).

Sang-ho Ro’s carefully researched contribution, “A Silkworm Massacre: Agricultural Development and Loss of Indigenous Diversity in Early Twentieth-Century Korea,” is one example of scholarship in this volume that omits the insect experience. Ro reveals how the Japanese imperial government “intentional[ly] dispos[ed]” of indigenous Korean silkworm varieties in favor of supposedly superior imported breeds. Swiftly adopting these new imperial silkworms, the locals manifested an “apolitical alliance” with the overseas metropole (112). Showing that imperialism is a multispecies process is always valuable. Yet the author concludes with a quotation from Measure for Measure, asking “Who, except Shakespeare, would shed a tear for poor insects?” Stuart H. Young, the author of a recent study, might reply: medieval Chinese Buddhists, and today’s scientists.Footnote ⁵ Young shows that middle-period monks viewed silkworms as “thinking, feeling, and moral subjects, as the kin of humans and deities, and as bodhisattvas themselves.”Footnote ⁶ With silk the indispensable fabric of monastic life, believers justified the bugs’ agonizing deaths by boiling as karmically conditioned and rich in didactic value. While medieval Buddhists’ conception of silkworm suffering arose from the metaphysics of reincarnation, Young draws from today’s scientific literature to show that these creatures can learn, remember, and feel pain. For all his eloquence, the Bard was neither the first nor the last person to contemplate and empathize with the sufferings of tiny insects.

I learned a great deal from Ro’s chapter. Still, the absence of silkworm suffering imposes the very anthropocentric perspective that this volume so admirably endeavors to correct. Ro shows how the Korean Silk Production Act spelled the end for the indigenous silkworm strains as silk producers expanded the territory of Japanese varieties such as B. mori. Briefly taking the perspective of the Korean Bombyx silkworm, the author provocatively describes this transition as a “bitter betrayal and cruel massacre” (112) after many years of fruitful cooperation between the original people and insects of the peninsula. But let us linger a bit in the silkworm’s cocoon. From an individual’s perspective, is having your wrapping scalded off a more desirable end than simply dying from a lack of habitat and resources? At least when the Korean silkworms disappeared, so too did their ultimate agony, and that of their offspring, through countless unborn generations. Colonial silk producers, like today’s organic cattle ranchers, might well have described their animals as having great lives, followed by one very bad day. But with no discussion of the silkworms’ embodied experience of growing, feeding, and boiling, the reader is ill-equipped to assess how empire affected insects themselves. Indeed, any Bombyx survivors might have seen the Japanese occupation of Korea as a merciful intervention. Silk production and its apparatus of excruciating death now targeted the Korean bugs’ less fortunate imported cousins. There are fates worse than extinction.

The final pair of essays—“Circumscribing China with Insects: A Manual of the Dragonflies of China and the Indigenization of Academic Entomology in the Republican Period” by Daniel Burton-Rose and “The Dialectics of Species: Chen Shixiang, Insect Taxonomy, and the ‘Species Problem’ in Socialist China” by Lijing Jiang—deals with the institutionalization of entomology in twentieth-century China. These chapters are thought-provoking and well written, but the insects appear as interchangeable widgets that are of interest only insofar as they illustrate people’s changing ways of scrutinizing, categorizing, and making sense of the natural world. The chapters clearly show how Chinese scientists negotiated the tensions between centuries of “Sinophone knowledge on human–insect relations” and new analytic schemas from Euro-America and the Soviet Union. But these fine pieces, and Mårten Söderblom Saarela’s “Manchu Insect Names: Grasshoppers, Locusts, and a Few Other Bugs in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” might fit more snugly into a collection on the hugely significant if unglamorous discipline of taxonomy. They show us how humans thought about insects. The beauty and challenge of insect humanities is its insistence that there are thinking, feeling, powerful beings on both sides of the magnifying lens.

This valuable book comes at a turbulent time in the multispecies history of our planet. Humans are recognizing our profound and humbling interdependence with insects just as many species are vanishing forever. As these organisms disappear, deeply weird and potent nonhuman entities are arriving, embodied in computer chips and robots. Intrepid researchers even dream of using artificially intelligent machines to replace the bugs we have driven into extinction. With “insect-like flight endurance, precision, and agility,” artificial drones are already replacing their squirmy organic cousins as pollinators and pest-killers.Footnote ⁷ On the spectrums of power and agency, artificial minds in cybernetic bodies may one day be as far from humans as we are from insects. We should hope that the machines will follow the example of these authors, and write our intertwined history with curiosity, rigor, and skill.