From the coconut business to the beetle market

Once the rhinoceros beetle arrived at Apia, it spread rapidly across the island. The female beetles move from one palm tree to another, leading the reproductive cycle, followed by male beetles seeking to mate. They mostly fly at night. In Samoa, they spread north-east due to the trade wind. Early reports, including two maps sketched by the colonial authorities, warned that the beetle was proliferating westwards and south-westwards, namely where the DHPG lands were (Figure 1).Footnote ²⁴ In October 1910, the rhinoceros beetle was recognised as a pest when the German colonial administration started to receive letters notifying it of the extensive destruction of palm trees by an unspecified insect. At the DHPG plantation in Vaitele, they cut down one of the affected palm trees and found dozens of beetles devouring the trunk.Footnote ²⁵ The beetles had attacked the palms at the base of the fronds, attached to the growing trunk, bored into the middle leaf axils, and reached the centre of the palm crown. Through its well-established scientific networks, the trade company directly contacted Paul Preuss, a renowned colonial botanist who had served German imperial ambitions for many years, in such roles as director of the Botanical Garden in Cameroon and prospector for plants in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. From his experience in his recent post as director of the New Guinea Company and as an expert in palm tree pests, he suggested that the insect was the ‘Indian rhinoceros beetle’, one of the most detrimental pests for palm trees, as he had seen himself in Lukuledi, German East Africa.Footnote ²⁶ A plantation there was ravaged by the beetle and Preuss urged the DHPG to stop the outbreak immediately. Apocalyptic rumours about the devastation of the whole copra business circulated rapidly among planters, triggering anxiety about inefficient administration amid shaky colonial rule in German Samoa.

Figure 1.

‘The route for the expedition to explore the distribution of the rhinoceros beetle’. The black arrow indicates the trade wind. Lines and squares show checked regions. ‘Upolu. Vorkommen des Nashornkäfers’, Deutsch Samoa: Geographischer Bezug, Pazifische Kolonien, Reichskolonialamt, R 1001-KART/11562, Barch.

Figure 1. Long description

The map depicts the island of Upolu and illustrates the spread of the rhinoceros beetle. The black arrow at the top indicates the direction of the trade wind, pointing from west to east. Various lines and squares mark the regions that have been checked for the presence of the beetle. Key labeled locations on the map include Aana, Tuamasaga, Aiga-i-le-Tai, and Atua. The map also shows the direction of the beetle’s spread, with notations indicating the movement towards the northeast due to the trade wind. The legend in the top right corner explains the symbols used: blue lines represent the trade wind, dashed lines indicate the spread of the beetle, and red squares mark the areas where the beetle has been found.

When the beetle crisis broke out, botanist and mycologist Karl Gehrmann had already been in German Samoa as a ‘cocoa inspector’ for some months, studying a fungal pest affecting plantations. The colonial administration sent him to assess the damage empirically, and he prepared the first scientific report on the beetle.Footnote ²⁷ On 5 November 1910, Gehrmann published an article in the Samoanische Zeitung on the (as yet unspecified) coconut pest.Footnote ²⁸ In the meantime, photographs of mutilated palm trees and coconuts, and of beetles and larvae, were mailed to Berlin to alert the authorities in the Reichs-Kolonialamt.Footnote ²⁹ As Preuss had predicted, it was the species Oryctes rhinoceros. In the same article, Gehrmann asked readers to inform him whether the insect had reached new locations, to collect any beetles they might find, and to encourage Samoans to do the same. The colonial administration was planning to create a special fund with which to eradicate of the beetle, he added, and further measures would be taken soon.

The fact that Gehrmann was in the Pacific and could respond ‘scientifically’ on behalf of the colonial administration was quite a coincidence, and situations of epistemic uncertainty, like that caused by the rhinoceros beetle, could lead to political crisis. The question of ‘scientific improvement’ in the German colonial space was regularly on the agenda at the turn of the century, but was not always a feasible reality. The famous Buitenzorg agricultural experimental station in the Dutch East Indies fuelled capitalist dreams of profitability for German planters and trade companies, while also promising scientific careers in the fields of agriculture, veterinary science, entomology, and phytopathology.Footnote ³⁰ Relocating the centres of experimentation in agricultural sciences from the West to the tropical world, as had been encouraged in Buitenzorg, was perceived as the most innovative and auspicious path for the development of plantation economies. However, for Berlin, creating a new agricultural station in Upolu meant doubling the investment in ‘colonial science’. With financial resources limited, this model of modern scientific agriculture was already operating in Victoria and Amani, and Berlin officers were hesitant to open a new research facility in the Pacific.Footnote ³¹ The question of installing such a botanical experimental station in Upolu gained momentum only in 1905, when scientists such as Preuss began to actively support this idea at the German Colonial Congress.Footnote ³² Two years later, Adolf Engler, director of the Botanical Central Station for the Colonies in Berlin, officially raised the suggestion with the Reichskolonialamt.Footnote ³³ By then, German Samoan authorities had already scouted land for an experimental station in Vailima, northern Apia.Footnote ³⁴ As Engler said, this station was intended to serve not only island planters, but the whole German Pacific space, including New-Guinea and the Marshall Islands.

The few botanical gardens in Upolu were planted by Anglican and Catholic missions with excellent results, as reported by Preuss. The establishment of an official colonial experimental station would mean developing new commodity crops, improving their productivity and protecting plantations from diseases and insect pests, Engler emphasised. Moreover, the location in Vailima was large enough to advance in a second stage with an ‘agricultural school’ for a future generation of planters and scientists. Despite the excellent location and geopolitical position, and Preuss and Engler’s persuasive planning, Berlin decided not to move forward with the project in Apia. Aside from financial reasons, the Reichskolonialamt argued that all plantations there had proved to be ‘naturally’ successful and that the decision to introduce new plants was not one to be taken by botanists in the experimental station, but by traders in the market.Footnote ³⁵ The only state responsibility they acknowledged was to protect the plantations with a fixed position for a phytopathologist, although no resources were available even for this in 1907. Only after much pressure from cocoa planters did Gehrmann arrive in German Samoa in late 1909. There, instead of studying the cocoa fungal pest, he was forced to deal with the rhinoceros beetle.

On the same date as Gehrmann’s article in the Samoanische Zeitung was published, the DHPG reiterated that the colonial administration should act urgently against the beetle pest.Footnote ³⁶ Two days later, on 7 November, an assembly organised by the colonial administration took place in the Apia market hall. Representatives of the DHPG and other trade companies, Euro-American planters, and Christian missionaries decided to create a special fund to tackle the beetle. The German administration and the DHPG ended up covering almost 80 per cent of it. Additionally, the colonial administration proposed a ‘beetle tax’ to increase the fund, while some planters provided Chinese and Melanesian contract labourers to support the eradication programme.Footnote ³⁷ Gehrmann attended the assembly to speak about the rhinoceros beetle and recommend measures to be taken in full and immediately (‘sofort und in vollem Umfange’).Footnote ³⁸ He first lectured on the biology of the rhinoceros beetle, from its native environment and reproduction to its development from larva to adult insect. Destroying the larvae rather than the beetles was crucial to stop the proliferation of the pest. He warned that the use of chemical substances and methods would not succeed. The only strategy that could be started immediately, he said, was to organise troops to catch beetles and exterminate larvae niches. For this purpose, the colonial authorities would play a key role in coordinating action across Upolu and administrating the fund.

Uncertainty about the future of plantations could lead to political crisis, and in this case it brought about the political and economic alignment of actors. It fostered knowledge production about the beetle and its control while allowing the imposition of a new regime of biotic surveillance on the island. Regarding its peripheral place in the German colonial bureaucracy, this critical juncture shows the limits of centralised colonial organisation in relation to local needs, which could not endure any delays. Despite the various communications with Berlin, local authorities did not receive a response about possible financial contributions from the Reichskolonialamt. In a telegram dated 25 November 1910, Wilhelm Solf, governor of German Samoa, insisted on support while stressing that the situation was a ‘Lebensfrage’ for the colony.Footnote ³⁹ Five days later, the Reichskolonialamt confirmed that it would double the fund for the extermination programme, costs that would be reimbursed by ‘white’ planters through the ‘beetle tax’ at the end of 1911.

The financial arrangement for the eradication programme was a successful and rapid first step in the alignment between the colonial administration, Euro-American planters, and Gehrmann. Nevertheless, the following months showed that the money and workforce were insufficient: a new epistemic paradigm, such as that proposed later by economic entomology, was required, and it was only put in place when Gehrmann’s tactics failed. His measures included cleansing the fields of any potential reproduction niches and manually collecting beetles and larvae, an approach that required very specific skills to identify and catch the 35 to 50-mm-long beetles and the 5 to 11-mm-long larvae in the abundant forests, plantations, and hills. As Edmund Russel explains in his seminal book War against Nature (2001), pest control methods were embedded from the beginning in a context of dominant military discourse and practices. As with the terms ‘pest’, ‘enemies’, ‘colonisation’, and ‘eradication’, the language that scientists used then (as now) was suffused with metaphors of war, invasion, and extermination, reflecting ideas of nativeness, normativity, and order.Footnote ⁴⁰ To eliminate the rhinoceros beetle, the colonial administration created six gangs (‘Kolonnen’) of fifty men each, one gang being made up of convicts, to search for the insect in every palm tree across Upolu.Footnote ⁴¹ These men were allowed access to all private lands, both ‘white’ and Indigenous fields, and permitted to destroy and burn infested palm trees and any wooden infrastructure that could host the beetle. They also had to catch the insect through different methods, by hand or with traps made from wood cuttings and filled with a sweet beverage made from beer, sugar, and fruit to attract the beetle. Given that this species flies at night, planters also had to light fires in the plantations so the gangs could collect the beetles in the air with a system of nets. Once collected, beetle and larvae were killed in boiling water.Footnote ⁴²

In addition to this military approach, a sanitary method was applied.Footnote ⁴³ This meant clearing all plantations of the wood cuttings on the ground and the rubbish left next to households, ideal places for beetle reproduction. This was in tension with the method Gehrmann proposed to combat the fungus affecting the cocoa plantations, whereby all plants infested by the fungus were to be burned.Footnote ⁴⁴ The remnants of these burnt cocoa trees were lying everywhere by the time the beetle arrived, and such places certainly helped the beetles proliferate. In the early twentieth century, German Samoa was shaped by diverse economic interests and multiple environmental ‘modular simplifications’, such as cocoa and coconut plantations, which the beetle connected to one another through its biological needs. These same needs and behaviours alarmed Gehrmann and the planters. They had to react immediately, not only because of the potential loss of existing palm trees, but also because, once the beetle expanded to the forests and hills outside the plantations, it might find an environment beyond human control in which to reproduce and so become endemic on the island. Applying Russel’s analysis to German Samoa, the anxiety generated by this ‘war against the beetle’ was partially eased by the military methods applied to control the insect. In the same vein, the biotic surveillance at play relied on a sense of urgency, and all lands, both ‘white’ and Indigenous, could be inspected by the colonial administration to assure that plantations were ‘cleaned’ and the eradication programme was followed to the letter. Even Iosefo Mataʻafa, the highest-ranking Samoan leader (Ali‘i Sili o Samoa), acknowledged by the German authorities in 1900, supported the colonial administration’s eradication campaign and asked for clear guidance on how to proceed.Footnote ⁴⁵

Hundreds of archival documents describe other strategies used in German Samoa (Figure 2).Footnote ⁴⁶ Part of the established fund was used to encourage contract labourers and Samoans, particularly children and women, as highlighted by Gehrmann, to collect beetles and larvae in exchange for money. Daily and weekly records reveal the number of collected insects deposited in the stations around Upolu, where the insects would be burned. The figures show remarkable evidence of the negative balance for the copra business. In all stations, for every beetle there were approximately fifty larvae. The DHPG reported a more dramatic ratio of 200 larvae per beetle.Footnote ⁴⁷ On 28 November 1910 reports from the stations in Savalalo and Le’auva’a indicated 47,479 larvae and only six beetles.Footnote ⁴⁸ Under favourable conditions, the life cycle of this beetle species, from egg to adult, lasts around six months. Adult beetles may live four to nine months and each female beetle lays 50–100 eggs during her lifetime. Calculating over months and years, the exponential reproduction and proliferation of the beetle would need far more efficient control methods or unfeasible dedication from all workers to eradicate the pest.Footnote ⁴⁹ Labour shortages in German Samoa had already led to the recruitment of Chinese and Melanesian contract labourers.Footnote ⁵⁰ The eradication programme thus reduced the plantation workforce: instead of collecting coconuts, men were now required to collect beetles. Moreover, offering money in exchange for beetles created a ‘beetle market’.Footnote ⁵¹ As Gehrmann and other planters realised later, Chinese, Melanesian, and Samoan workers caught and delivered ‘rhinoceros beetles’ that were nothing of the sort, but were paid for them regardless.Footnote ⁵²

Figure 2.

An example of the hundreds of records about the collection of beetles and larvae. The tables are organised by date and location and distinguish adult beetles from larvae. Most relevant is the indication of whether the insects collected were correctly (‘richtig’) identified or erroneously (‘falsch’). Bekämpfung des Nashornkäfers, German Colonial Administration—Samoa, R24050520, fols. 484–5, ANZ.

For example, the American planter Harry Moors, who had settled in Upolu in 1884, complained to the colonial administration that of over one hundred insects for which he had paid for, on closer inspection only three were Oryctes rhinoceros. Footnote ⁵³ From the colonisers’ point of view, it was unclear whether they lacked the knowledge and skill to identify the appropriate species, or whether they were deliberately capitalising on colonial and economic anxieties to make a profit. Optimism about the military and sanitary approaches began to decrease after a few months when financial constraints and statistics presented adverse prospects. As the archival sources reveal, the ‘beetle market’ represented empirical evidence for both the expansive proliferation of the beetle and the failure of the methods applied. The more beetles and larvae were brought to the stations, the more alarmingly the numbers confirmed their multiplication. That Chinese, Melanesians, and Samoans supposedly misrecognised the species indicated a lack of control over their ‘honest’ will, but also the specific knowledge required to identify the beetles correctly. In late 1910, economic uncertainty around the epistemic regime caused political tensions in German Samoa to resurface. As the archive sources indicate, the administration decided to cool any capitalist anxieties, by ceasing to publish news about the beetle crisis in the Samoanische Zeitung.Footnote ⁵⁴

The early phase of the rhinoceros beetle outbreak, and the public anxieties it provoked among planters, reveal the fragile epistemic and labour landscape of plantation economies such as the coconut business in German Samoa. Dependence on a single primary commodity exposed the unexpected consequences of the ‘modular simplification’ produced by the logics of capitalism and its monocultural transformation of ecosystems, which ultimately facilitated the beetle’s feral proliferation. It also underscored the limited scientific understanding of such monocultural enterprises and the lack of knowledge needed to deal with this insect. Addressing this ecological friction also required a workforce, a need exacerbated by the scarcity of labour and the violence experienced by Samoans as well as Chinese and Melanesian contract workers under German colonial rule. These ecological frictions began to resurface not only as social tensions surrounding Samoan labour and land ownership but also, unexpectedly, as forms of tacit resistance, as explained in the next section.

Samoan resistance and labour in the beetle campaign

While exerting biotic surveillance in colonised territories was part of the agreed strategy of the German administration and Euro-American planters, the beetle crisis arguably operated in a different way for Samoan people. Methodological questions about the ‘global archive’ and the possible extent of re-centring Indigenous perspectives are matters of current debate.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Martin Dusinberre put it, different kinds of histories can be heard ‘when divergent archival contexts and epistemologies are brought into conversation with one other’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although the German Samoan archive preserves a surprisingly large number of documents about the eradication programme, the colonial-administrative nature of these sources leaves little room for the role and agency of Samoan people in the eradication campaign—a recurrent concern for historians that requires some conjectural exercise. A few letters in the Samoan language are kept in these records, together with German colonial regulations on pest control in the same language. These sources could be a gateway to recover such perspectives, although they prove essentially the intention of grounding official communication on the eradication programme. They bear witness to the confidence of the colonial administration in Western literacy practices, flattening Samoans’ attitudes towards the beetle. Western literacy in colonial contexts, as Michel de Certeau reminds us, set up a fundamental difference between those who hold the power of writing and those who did not.Footnote ⁵⁷

As beetle control proved unmanageable and the labour for it scarce, colonial topoi about the ‘backwardness’ and ‘laziness’ of Samoans appeared recurrently in the sources. Such arguments were used by some Euro-American planters to exert greater control over the Indigenous people, and to confiscate their land. As I propose in this section, a different interpretation of Samoan agency in the beetle crisis comes to the fore when we situate it within the broader political and economic contexts in which Samoans sought to challenge German rule. Reading the archive against the grain offers a more comprehensive account of how the beetle destabilised German colonial order and opened new spaces for Indigenous resistance. Moreover, by deconstructing the colonial topoi of Samoan ‘backwardness’ and ‘laziness’ in light of contemporary ethnography, a new understanding of the interactions between Samoans and the beetle emerges—one that emphasises the relevance of more-than-human analytical approaches for the study of the history of capitalism and exemplifies how a multispecies lens could be applied to interpret the ‘global archive’ in new ways.Footnote ⁵⁸

Recent scholarship on the history of German colonialism in the Pacific has highlighted the dynamics of Samoans negotiating and contesting colonial rule in both explicit and implicit ways. In contrast to experiences of German colonialism in Africa, German Samoa was governed as a ‘liberal colony’, as Matthew Fitzpatrick expounds in A Pacific Power (2025). Under a ‘liberal colonial’ regime, Samoans kept their kinship and Indigenous political organisation, owned land, and were not forced to work for Euro-American planters. Instead, contract Chinese and Melanesian labourers were brought in. The core of such ‘liberal imperialism’ consisted of a progressive incorporation of Samoans into forms of economic life that mirrored European ‘civilisation’. As Fitzpatrick thoroughly details, Governor Solf effectively reinforced the project of Samoa as a ‘liberal’ colony by actively refusing certain German economic interests in transforming the Pacific archipelago into a project of settler colonialism.Footnote ⁵⁹ In this context, a paradigmatic case of Samoan strategies of resistance and self-determination was the creation of ‘Oloa Kamupani in 1904, copra cooperatives that aimed to improve the position of Samoans in the international market by avoiding the mediation of German firms.Footnote ⁶⁰ As Holger Droessler explains at length in Coconut Colonialism (2022), the ‘Oloa movement founded copra cooperative companies in the Samoan Islands ‘to wrest economic control over the copra trade from dominant Euro-American traders such as the DHPG’.Footnote ⁶¹ By circumventing the Euro-American intermediaries in the global copra market, the ‘Oloa movement strove to ‘[regain] political power through economic power’, and campaign ‘for participation in the company as a patriotic venture’.Footnote ⁶² Behind these economic motivations, the emergence of the ‘Oloa movement showed, as Fitzpatrick writes, a ‘vehicle for Samoan political assertiveness’ in a longer history of Samoan resistance to Euro-American imperialism.Footnote ⁶³

Such explicit expressions of self-determination survived and resurfaced in the early twentieth century in the form of political movements—first in 1908 with the Mau a Pule, and later in the late 1920s, under the New Zealand Mandate, with the Mau.Footnote ⁶⁴ While such movements revealed a constant drive for Samoan self-determination as a ‘history of the elites’,Footnote ⁶⁵ the beetle crisis and the related labour needs created space for more implicit forms of resistance, similar to other spontaneous, unpremeditated rebellions against colonial power documented in Pacific history, such as street demonstrations, strikes, and episodes of ‘violence from below’ or so-called ‘renegade history’.Footnote ⁶⁶ By late 1910, the rhinoceros beetle crisis had reactivated long-standing tensions over Samoan labour and lands within the colonial state. Fluctuating participation of Samoans in coconut plantation work generated ongoing uncertainty, particularly in relation to the eradication campaign. Moreover, accusations that Samoans had allowed the beetles to infest their coconut plantations called into question their right to ownership. These tensions and accusations should be read against the grain to illuminate Samoan agency amid the beetle crisis.

Given that insects do not consider property-related or political borders, how Samoans dealt with the bug was an important concern for the eradication campaign. After Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972), it became received wisdom that histories of colonialism involved the introduction of foreign non-human actors to native populations. The beetle was one case in a long list of viruses, rats, wasps, and shame plants that had affected Samoans since the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁷ So as not to feed the ‘colonial curse’, the authorities told the Samoans that the beetle had arrived in Upolu from the ocean, via strong winds.Footnote ⁶⁸ By spreading this false information, colonial officers hoped Samoans would join forces against the pest. The checking and clearing of Samoan cooperative plantations could then take place, with Samoans focused only on the war against the beetle. Official notices in Samoan language were distributed among villages, publicising the eradication programme (Figure 3).Footnote ⁶⁹ Photographs of the beetle and damaged palm trees were also displayed to share scientific evidence, as Gehrmann suggested.Footnote ⁷⁰

Figure 3.

Colonial communication in Samoan about the regulations. Bekämpfung des Nashornkäfers, R24050519, fol. 5, ANZ.

The colonial administration also considered paying higher prices for insects and larvae collected by Samoans, but not for long. The American planter Moors was one of those who actively communicated his discontent about the strategy with Samoans to the colonial authorities, with racist overtones. He accused the Samoans of inflating the prices for collected insects. He sent regular reports about their indifference to the pest issue, interpreting it through the racist bias grounded in the topos of ‘laziness’.Footnote ⁷¹ He claimed that palm trees in Samoan-owned territories were completely infested with the beetle and that the eradication programme was not being followed. Additionally, Moors jeopardised Samoans’ livelihoods, proposing that they be dispossessed of their land if they did not cooperate with the campaign. As Gehrmann’s report indicated, Samoan households and food customs, including the practices around household waste, created perfect breeding spots for the beetle, and the proposals from Moors and the DHPG would have intervened in Samoan ways of life in unprecedented ways.Footnote ⁷²

The critical juncture of the coconut pest caused old tensions to return and brought new opportunities for the colonial order in German Samoa, while racist assumptions simmered amid the coconut pest anxiety. The surveillance introduced with the eradication programme shows how scientific knowledge and sanitary policies were combined to set up a new biotic order that kept capitalist interests expanding, even though, paradoxically, it was the same capitalist expansion with increasing circulation of raw materials and faster shipping infrastructures that had brought the beetles to the island. The beetle proliferated and colonised new lands in Upolu; the special fund for the eradication programme was spent; and the mood among planters and colonial authorities added to the general discontent. Chinese, Melanesians, and especially Samoans began to be seen as an additional problem in the fight against the beetle. Their labour was needed more than ever, but the ‘beetle market’ gave them new avenues for ‘tacit’ resistance.Footnote ⁷³

Some light can be shed on this gap in the sources by contemporary anthropology. Studying the agrobusiness of palm oil in West Papua, Sophie Chao reflects on how the rhinoceros beetle, among many other palm tree parasites, constituted mutualistic and multispecies alliances with and for the Indigenous Marind people to deal with a ‘plant that embodies the top-down control of a colonising state and its capitalist agendas’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the broader context of the coconut business in German Samoa, divergent meanings were attributed to the insect, and the ‘beetle crisis’ was certainly perceived differently by planters, colonial administrators, and Samoans. The beetle could be regarded as a ‘multispecies ally’ against the colonial and capitalist projects of the copra industry. Reading the sources from this perspective, the apparent ‘passiveness’ and ‘laziness’ of Samoans towards the beetle since 1909 can be considered an act of tacit resistance incomprehensible to the planters and colonial authorities and difficult for historians to grasp when only looking at the colonial archive. Evidence of Samoans’ capacity appeared later, when they did start to take the pest seriously, after they experienced the major loss of their own plantations and food gardens, a disaster for which they blamed the German colonial administration.

A different kind of evidence about Samoan entomological skills is found when some planters accused them of breeding the beetle to then sell in the ‘beetle market’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In a letter, Moors refers to an episode involving a Samoan who was unhappy about a transaction concerning beetle larvae. According to Moors’s letter, the Samoan said: ‘Well, we will leave the larvae alone in the rotten logs, until they grow and are marketable.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Moors added that similar situations had occurred in the form of bargaining with Samoans. The DHPG manager Otto Riedel also complained that the Samoans kept some larvae as a ‘form of savings’ (‘Spargut’) so that they could later earn a little pocket money (‘Taschengeld’).Footnote ⁷⁷ As impossible it is to test such an accusation, breeding insects in the Asian and Pacific contexts is a widely documented practice.Footnote ⁷⁸ Moreover, oral testimonies I collected from scientific personnel who worked on eradication campaigns in Western Samoa funded by international organisations in the 1970s and 1980s note that rearing this insect for experimental purposes required no additional work or care. It would therefore have been feasible to breed these beetles without specific expertise, as an act of resistance.

The beetle’s proliferation was a disaster for planters and the colonial administration, but an opportunity for Samoans, as can be seen in the post-German period. During the First World War and even later, during the Mandate period under New Zealand, the coconut industry in former German Samoa continued to struggle with the beetle and used similar strategies of eradication.Footnote ⁷⁹ Immediately after the British-New Zealand occupation, the authorities in Auckland created a Beetle Coconut Commission to fight the pest.Footnote ⁸⁰ New strategies with which to tackle the beetle now concerned mostly Chinese and Melanesians contract labourers and Samoans, and it became mandatory for male adult Samoans to collect beetles and larvae every Monday morning.Footnote ⁸¹ Samoans were also hired to mediate between local communities and the New Zealand authorities. Chinese and Melanesians had to do the same in their plantations and any planter who did not comply was sanctioned. Trial records show that this was mostly the case for German planters, from which it can be inferred that such processes reflected political tensions before the establishment of the League of Nations mandate.Footnote ⁸²

Despite these compulsory measures, the beetle population did not decrease. Appealing to modernist imaginations, enthusiastic New Zealanders promoted cinema events across the island where women and children could exchange beetles for tickets.Footnote ⁸³ These cinema evenings ran for years. As under the German colonial regime, the beetle remained one of the most significant issues for the environmental and economic reality of the island under the Mandate. The beetles spanned social and political tensions in an already fragmented power constellation. Enforced beetle collection under the New Zealand mandate became another site of contestation when the Mau movement began acting against the administration in 1927. Samoans started to neglect the compulsory weekly search for the rhinoceros beetle ‘through an organised refusal to destroy the insect’, an action that was perceived as a rebellious threat to New Zealand’s economic and political order.Footnote ⁸⁴ Concern about the Mau movement and the rhinoceros beetle even reached the League of Nations.Footnote ⁸⁵ As illustrated in the press, the Mau movement and its ‘passive resistance’ retrospectively confirmed many suspicions dating from the German colonial period about the performed ‘laziness’ of Samoans regarding the rhinoceros beetle.

This highly explicit reference to Samoan agency and the rhinoceros beetle illuminates, a posteriori, some of the conclusions drawn from reading the colonial archive against the grain through a multispecies lens. Thus, Indigenous agency during the beetle crisis, and Samoan entomological knowledge more broadly, can only be reconsidered conjecturally—by recovering the multispecies interactions that become legible when contemporary ethnography is brought into dialogue with more-than-human historical approaches. Samoan agency—and, arguably, resistance—may have manifested in many tacit ways: either by leaving coconut plantations uncontrolled and allowing the beetle to proliferate, or through the clandestine rearing of beetles, by which some Samoans capitalised on the beetle market.

By 1912, the scientific methods and military approach to the beetle were shown to be insufficient, not only because of the proliferation of the rhinoceros beetle but also, as I have reconstructed, because of Samoan agency in a context of scarce labour. A more sophisticated scientific method was the only hope left to the German administration and the Euro-American planters. The colonial administration replaced Gehrmann, who was not entirely trained in ‘insects’, with an economic entomologist, Karl Friederichs. Cutting-edge science about insects in agricultural ecosystems was another arena where colonial powers demonstrated their strength to rule territories and render resources profitable. As I elaborate below, the rhinoceros beetle’s colonisation and the emergence of economic entomology came together in German Samoa, marking an important conjuncture in the history of capitalist expansion and agricultural development, namely the knowledge of how to improve biotic control over ecological frontiers. Plantations in Upolu became the ground where new scientific practices were tested that would later be incorporated for the expansion of commodity production across the tropical world.

Ecological frictions and pest control

Insect pests and plant diseases, as mentioned above, were important challenges for the expansion of capitalism at the turn of the century. Arguably, economic entomology and phytopathology emerged during this period to solve multiple ‘ecological frictions’ in plantations across the globe. Monocultures created environmental conditions that allowed insects to reproduce faster, and fungi and other parasites to circulate more widely; that is, dynamics of modular simplification and feral proliferation. The institutionalisation of these disciplines in the United States, the British empire, the Italian Peninsula, the Dutch East Indies and, to a certain extent, in the German colonies, speaks to the co-evolution and co-constitution of this novel epistemic regime under a new biotic order. The rhinoceros beetle and its threat to the copra business triggered an array of reactions that realigned different human and non-human actors. Urgency and anxiety went hand-in-hand to protect the profitability of the coconut plantations, and more broadly to expand commodity frontiers.Footnote ⁸⁷

Dynamics of frictions and fixes, globally knotted and locally embedded, are a productive field for the analysis of commodity frontiers and the transformation of the environment, as proposed by Sven Beckert et al. (2021). They seek to understand the expansion of capitalism not as a straightforward, teleological drive, but instead acknowledging frictions, counter movements, and resistances.Footnote ⁸⁸ In a similar vein, Jason W. Moore redefines the modern world-system as a capitalist world ecology—‘a world-historical matrix of human and extra-human nature premised on endless commodification’.Footnote ⁸⁹ He later develops a more nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of agencies involved in forming and reforming ‘species-environment configurations’.Footnote ⁹⁰ As this article shows, the emergence of pest control research since 1890 frames the global histories of human–insect interactions as invasion and colonisation, outbreaks and setbacks, expansion and contraction in a ‘more-than-human’ perspective.Footnote ⁹¹ Instead, insects can be reconsidered as ecological frictions, as unexpected significant actors in both shaping capitalist undertakings and mobilising financial, epistemic, and political resources.Footnote ⁹² Beckert et al. also point to the period from the 1850s to the 1970s as a second commodity regime largely characterised by the conjunction of spatial, technological, and state-led fixes. As in German Samoa and elsewhere, the development of economic entomology was a response to ecological frictions generated by the rhinoceros beetle or other insects deemed ‘pests’. As explained below, it was a techno-scientific fix led by the German colonial administration under the sponsorship (and pressure) of planters, trade companies, and, partially, Samoan groups.

Insect pests and plant diseases were not only a problem for planters. Their study and epistemic construction were at the cutting edge of the understanding of biology and ecology at the turn of the century, and how they were approached scientifically depended on these new theoretical frameworks and on the experiments practiced in the plantations, whether in regional stations in the United States and Europe or in colonial spaces. The formation of scientific constructs and disciplinary fields reveals the complexity of the strategies developed by humans to deal with non-human actors and other related environmental factors, as demonstrated by the beetle outbreak in German Samoa. When the cocoa inspector and botanist Gehrmann left Upolu on 14 January 1911, less than two months after the beetle crisis began started, his successor Karl Friederichs was working at the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg. After years as an inspector for the Union Fisheries in Brandenburg, he had become an entomologist to study the introduction of tropical species at the Hamburg port.Footnote ⁹³ Gehrmann’s position was vacant for six months until the Reichskolonialamt contacted the young Friederichs. Recruitment was not easy given the precarious financial and housing conditions offered by the German Samoa administration. Hermann Morstatt, a renowned ‘colonial’ phytopathologist at the Biological Agricultural Institute in Amani, rejected the position for these reasons.Footnote ⁹⁴ Between the official notification and Friederichs’s departure, he had only a few weeks to take advice about the tropics from his colleagues in Hamburg. As he recalled in his memoirs, he felt that it was more an order than an invitation to move to the ‘Südseeparadies’. In Berlin he sought the counsel of Professor Heymons, director of the Institute for Agricultural Zoology, who said: ‘I wish you all the best, but we Germans know very little about the practical matters of entomology; Americans do it better.’Footnote ⁹⁵ With mixed feelings of national duty and scientific pride, colonial fantasy and academic ambition, Friederichs set sail for German Samoa in August 1912 with the official title of ‘phytopathologist’.

The justification for creating a role and a scientific approach to pest control, particularly in the colonial space, was the result of the work of another economic entomologist named Karl Escherich, considered today the ‘father’ of applied entomology in Germany. Between 1908 and 1913, Escherich learned about the current state of applied entomology.Footnote ⁹⁶ He visited Eritrea, Ceylon, and the United States and wrote about insects, pest control research, and the careers of his fellow entomologists. Particularly after his visit to the United States, he was astonished at the development of economic entomology under the Bureau of Entomology, created in 1893. This institution inspired him to propose a reform of entomological research for the German state and its colonies.Footnote ⁹⁷ Escherich, who became Professor of Applied Zoology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1914, was an ambitious and energetic scientist who led the institutionalisation of this discipline in the German context in the first half of the twentieth century. Until then, chairs of entomology or zoology were experts in natural history and its systematic approach, whereas applied entomologists and phytopathologists were marginalised from academic circles, working in regional agricultural stations, port customs, and the private sector, such as fisheries.

The German colonial space was mostly under the inspection of botanists or, in Escherich’s terminology, ‘free of zoologists’ (‘zoologenfrei’). The sole exception was the period 1903–8 when the Biological Agricultural Institute in Amani, German East Africa, was directed by entomologist Julius Vosseler.Footnote ⁹⁸ The urgency of the beetle crisis in German Samoa changed this. While the appointment of the young entomologist Karl Friedrichs, who arrived in Apia in October 1912, represented a success for the relatively niche field of German entomology, within the British empire it was commonplace to have at least one entomologist in every colonial territory, and in 1913 the Imperial Bureau of Entomology was created. In the context of high imperialism, the beetle outbreak in German Samoa was more than an economic matter for planters and trade companies.Footnote ⁹⁹ It was an opportunity for German, American, and British entomologists to prove their usefulness for ‘colonial science’.

As was proven by Gerhmann’s lack of success, the beetle infestation required knowledge of insects, not plants. At the turn of the century, Central European scientific paradigms around plant diseases embraced both those caused by fungi and bacteria, and those caused by insects. This slight distinction, already specified and institutionalised in the United States and in British imperial contexts, shows the blurred boundaries in the formation of scientific objects and their consequences for the discipline. As publications and other records show, Friederichs was referred to as ‘phytopathologist’ and ‘zoologist’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The first title denoted his colonial position, the second his academic expertise: that is, unlike Gehrmann, Friederichs was not a botanist and dealt only with animals. More than his academic title, it was his practical experience in fisheries and at the renowned Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg that gave the Reichskolonialamt and the German Samoan planters hope. For Friederichs, the practical (i.e., applied) dimension of entomology implied an ecological understanding of insect behaviour and development. It considered insects from embryo to adult, their reproduction, preferred conditions, and feeding behaviour. This change forged a more sustained understanding of the ecology and ethology of insects at the time, compared with the study of morphology and biogeography from stuffed insects, as was common in European museum and university collections. Knowledge of living insects was crucial to preventing outbreaks, which in turn was only possible if all this information was available. To a certain extent, the first measures undertaken by Gehrmann tackled the reproduction phase and the beetles’ preferred ecological niches, although they were insufficient. Friederichs followed this with an early form of biological control, a kind of multispecies engineering and the most advanced pest control method of the period—certainly one that proved the pioneering sophistication of economic entomology as a science and as a transimperial infrastructure.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Biological control was the most advanced and relatively successful method available for pest control in the early twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁰² Extensive use of chemical insecticides was rare, expensive, and inefficient. Biological control relied on the newest ecological approaches to insect behaviour, climate, and plant distribution, and further developments in thought around natural selection. The idea of a ‘natural enemy’ was at the core of this method, implying a re-establishment of the ‘natural balance’ of species in a new environment.Footnote ¹⁰³ The German American entomologist Alfred Koebele effectively demonstrated the introduction of ‘natural enemies’ to fight an insect pest for the first time.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ After years of researching cotton insect pests in the Southern states and Brazil, Koebele travelled to Australia to find the species that could diminish the population of cottony cushion scale (Icerya purchasi) that had been destroying orange trees in California since 1885. He had Vedalia beetles (Rodolia cardinalis) captured and took them to California, where the scale pest could be reduced and thus ‘naturally’ controlled. This is considered the first successful application of biological control of insect pests.

The Californian growers rewarded Koebele, and years later the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association contracted him to fight sugar cane pests. He travelled the Pacific and Indian oceans studying different sugar cane plantations, continuing with the ‘Koebele method’ of bringing in parasitic species to fight harmful insects in Hawai‘i. The prominent American entomologist Leland Howard considered him ‘one of the best collectors and one of the most skilled preparators who ever lived’, stating that ‘the results of his work have been of great value to this country and Hawaii’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Friederichs belonged to the vanguard generation of entomologists like Koebele and proposed the same method to fight the rhinoceros beetle in German Samoa. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent a turning point where ecological frictions in commodity frontiers—such as insect pests and fungal diseases—drove research on pest control. Diverse economic interests and private stakeholders, from Samoa and Hawaiʻi to Cuba and Egypt, were deeply concerned about the negative biological externalities arising from the global circulation of these diseases and called for greater investment in the scientific institutionalisation of this field. Koebele and Friederichs, like many economic entomologists, stood at the intersection of capitalist expansion and environmental transformation in plantation economies across the Pacific world and beyond.

Biological control was both a scientific innovation and a response to the increasing circulation of insects, fungi, and bacteria caused by shipping raw materials. Jessica Wang understands this innovative practice in terms of ‘infrastructure’, like many other technological systems introduced for the economic development of colonial territories (railroads, canals, dams, etc.) during this period. This ‘biological infrastructure’ was one of the key pest control tools developed by ‘tropical agriculture’, connecting living organisms from (very) distant places.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ From the economic perspective, biological control was intended to fix what global capitalism had disarranged, in order to expand commodity frontiers. This meant connecting imperial spaces and environments in a new way. The German authorities rightly believed that the rhinoceros beetle arrived from Ceylon: Oryctes rhinoceros commonly populated the surrounding regions of the Indian Ocean from East Africa to South Asia. To search for potential ‘natural enemies’, Friederichs had to survey the original contexts of the rhinoceros beetle, which were as diverse as the imperial geopolitics in these regions. This scientific enterprise was an expensive one that, given the limited financial resources of the German colonial authorities, could only be justified by the extraordinary crisis of the coconut pest.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Amid tensions among imperial powers, it also required a shared understanding of the global need to fight insect pests for all colonial regimes. Trans-imperial collaboration among colonial states and scientists was necessary: insects could sneak in without any regard for political borders and threaten the conjunction of capitalist enterprise and imperial expansion.

The introduction of ‘natural enemies’ was an innovative practice by the early twentieth century, but not completely unknown to non-scientists. During the first months of the beetle outbreak in German Samoa, the DHPG proposed bringing in birds to eat the beetles, or pigs to eat the larvae in mud.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Similar approaches had been tested elsewhere, but often without any empirical basis, and sometimes caused collateral outbreaks.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The idea of biological control fuelled imaginaries of natural selection and war among species, very much in tune with the colonial masculinity of the imperial age.Footnote ¹¹⁰ However, such methods required very precise application from scientists, not traders. Friederichs combined the modern imaginary of techno-scientific fixes and his own interest in experimenting on the ground, later transformed into a Habilitationsschrift.

With sufficient funding and personal ambition, the young entomologist began a scientific expedition through the Philippines, Cochin China, Cambodia, Siam, Singapore, the Malaysian States, Ceylon, South India, Zanzibar, German and British East Africa, and Madagascar. He spent around a month in each place, gathering scientific and Indigenous knowledge about the rhinoceros beetle and related species. He learned pest control methods that had been applied in these places, and searched for the beetle’s natural enemies. With the support of local planters and scientists, he carried out experiments in field laboratories and plantations (Figure 4).Footnote ¹¹¹ In Madagascar, an unnamed coconut planter ordered his workers to collect beetles and larvae, which were later sent to Friederichs, after weeks of rain. Brown stains in the collected larvae caught his eye. He noticed that, after a few days the larvae had died, and took some samples of the stains to send to Berlin. These stains were then found to be the insect fungus Metarrhizium anisopliae, which affected beetle reproduction. This was a ‘cosmopolitan’ fungus, in Friederich’s words, that existed all over the world and had already been described by British and Dutch scientists. The same fungus could be found in German Samoa, but it could not reproduce naturally in that climate conditions in the quantities needed to infect the beetle. With his actions, Friederichs would change this ecological condition.Footnote ¹¹²

Figure 4.

‘Working on a palm plantation’. Like most of the pictures in this book, Friedrich is shown performing a kind of imperial scientific masculinity, often centring him over other male and female figures, and hierarchising social and race differences. Friedrichs, Wanderungen und Wandlungen, 1: 429.

The first step was the scientific ‘discovery’. The next involved shipping the Metarrhizium anisopliae from Madagascar to Samoa. On his return to Samoa, Friedrichs took an infested beetle imago and started to breed the fungus at his field laboratory in Upolu (Figures 5 and 6).Footnote ¹¹³ A German cocoa planter, Ernst Demandt, officiated as his scientific assistant, providing carpentry and infrastructure, and helping with the experiments. Regularly, Friederichs and Demandt liberated infected beetles to spread the fungus to the wild insects. Similar procedures were undertaken in plantations across Upolu. They took advantage of the traps that had already been set in the plantations, mixing infected larvae into the mud inside the traps. After some months, insects other than the rhinoceros beetle were also infected by the fungus, which meant that the Metarrhizium anisopliae was starting to become endemic to the insect ecologies of German Samoa. More and more collected rhinoceros beetles and larvae proved to be infected: clear evidence that the population would decrease. Over time, the outcome was more consistent when the technique was applied by the planters on their own lands, as the DHPG frequently reported. In comparison with the irregular campaigns carried out by the colonial administration, financial interests and controlled labour resources were key to maintaining and increasing the expansion of the fungus. Biological control worked best when it was predicated on continuous application and financing.

Figure 5.

The insect fungus Metarrhizium anisopliae. Figure 47 shows a larva infested by the fungus. Friedrichs, Studien über Nashornkäfer, 79.

Figure 5. Long description

Panel 43: A detailed drawing of the fungal structures of Metarrhizium anisopliae. Panel 44: A close-up view of the fungal hyphae. Panel 45: A depiction of the fungal spores. Panel 46: An image of a beetle infested by the fungus. Panel 47: A larva infested by the fungus.

Figure 6.

‘Device for cultivating the fungus Metarrhizium anisopliae on rhinoceros beetle larvae in Samoa’. Friedrichs, Studien über Nashornkäfer, 89.

To extend the use of Metarrhizium anisopliae as a control method, Friederichs returned to the same places where he had gathered information during his first ‘beetle expedition’. In Java, Ceylon, and Dar es Salaam, he experimented to see whether the fungus could be used against other insect pests. In July 1914, amid the outbreak of the Great War, French colonial authorities in Madagascar interned Friederichs when he reached Îlot Prune. He was isolated for two years and the plans for his scientific expedition were frustrated. In his memoirs, Friederichs notes that he kept his microscope and papers with him.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Imprisoned in Fort Duchesne and Cape Diego Suarez, he continued his entomological experiments, profiting from the rich local ecologies, and managed to finish important writing on the rhinoceros beetle and its biological control. He sent these manuscripts to Karl Escherich in Munich and corresponded with the German Samoan authorities and with Demandt in Apia, who continued cultivating the fungus in the hope that, after the war, ‘Samoa would be German again’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Friederichs followed the propagation of the Metarrhizium anisopliae as part of the eradication campaign. In Berlin, the Reichskolonialamt asked the American embassy to coordinate the shipping of scientific artefacts with Paris, to allow Friedrich to continue his research in prison.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Friederichs’s time in Madagascar reveals the relevance of his knowledge for global economic and colonial interests, even during a war. Pests affecting plantations were a business matter, and scientific advancement in this field represented benefits for all colonial powers. Friederichs’s ‘dis-connected’ internment and isolation in Madagascar contrasts with the highly connected transimperial spaces of the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the flows of biota, capital, and crops that shaped them. Like ideas around Oryctes rhinoceros, Friederichs’s fame reached not only Berlin and Hamburg but also agricultural stations across the globe, and with them the hope that the new economic entomology brought for the expansion of commodity frontiers. At such a critical juncture, colonial and state borders did not matter. As with other insect pests, the rhinoceros beetle was seen as the actual ‘natural enemy’ of planters and traders and, therefore, of colonial interests. It was a struggle between this species and the way global capitalism was operating at the turn of the twentieth century.

Ecological frictions and entomological fixes began to occur systemically during this period. In Hawai‘i and Peru, in Trinidad and Ceylon, economic entomologists gained space for experimentation and sponsorship for their careers. They embodied the joint interests of both colonial administrators and planters, exploring novel ways to understand how nature works. Biological control was at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. Their application in the Samoan Islands was evidence to extend the realm of economic entomologists. After his Pacific sojourn, Friederichs had an international career. He was commissioned to fight coffee pests in the Dutch East Indies, was a member of the Istituto Internazionale di Agricoltura in Rome, and visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, an important hub of applied entomology in the United States. Friederichs later became Professor for Applied Zoology at the University of Rostock. His publications continued to contribute to the field of pest control and ecological theory. Ökologie als Wissenschaft von der Natur oder biologische Raumforschung (Leipzig, 1937) is considered one of the foundational works of ecology as a science and draws on his work with the rhinoceros beetle and the fungus Metarrhizium anisopliae.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Friederichs’s intervention is a paradigmatic case of human responses to insect pests that caused incalculable losses for planters and traders. These pests, however, were conditioned by the same capitalist development at the turn of the century. Such environmental transformations required new epistemic strategies and practices. As in German Samoa and elsewhere, this period saw the emergence of a new international biotic order shaped by dialectical dynamics of human and non-human territorialisations. Economic entomology was at the core of this environmental and economic conjuncture caused by global capitalism and the expansion of commodity frontiers.

Towards a multispecies history of capitalism

After Samoa in 1909, the beetle reached Keppel Island in 1921, Wallis Island in 1931, the Palau Islands in 1942, New Guinea in 1942, and Tonga and Fiji in 1953. Significant campaigns were led by British and American entomologists, introducing new natural enemies. A major milestone in the campaign against the beetle was the Project for Research on the Control of the Coconut Palm Rhinoceros Beetle, created by the South Pacific Commission with the support of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This project was part of a larger plant protection programme from the 1950s for the economic development in what was then called the Third World. This international framework established a shared infrastructure for scientific cooperation and stations were founded across the Pacific, from Western Samoa and New Caledonia to Fiji, providing a comprehensive multilateral and multilocal approach to the beetle pest. As various reports stated, numerous experiments with biota exchanges were performed over the decades in an attempt to discover the most effective natural enemy, from parasites and fungi to other insects, like centipedes and true bugs. As with the rhinoceros beetle, the global circulation of knowledge about pest control has since produced new socioecological dynamics across the Global South, and powerfully shaped the model of agricultural production to this day. More recently, in August 2023, a new chapter in the planetary life of the rhinoceros beetle started: it reached the islands of Oahu and Kauai, in Hawai‘i. Newspapers and television reported on this alarming event. Another ‘crisis management campaign’, like that in German Samoa one hundred years before, was undertaken.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This ‘century old-invasion’, as a recent scientific publication described it, seems to never end and expands with, not despite, capitalist aspirations.Footnote ¹²⁰

As ‘natural’ as the study of insects might sound, understanding the historical process of converting insects into ‘pests’—materially, rhetorically, and scientifically—sheds light on practices, infrastructures, and strategies that shaped forms of agricultural modernity in the early twentieth century. Histories of insects, and particularly insects as ‘pests’, are thus a suitable explorative ground from which to recast the historical understanding of capitalism and the environment. The first outbreak of the rhinoceros beetle in German Samoa in 1909, as examined in this article, highlights the intertwined dynamics of imperial capitalism and environmental transformation, revealing how non-human actors could disrupt the seemingly boundless expansion of plantation economies in the Pacific. This was one instance within a wider pattern of similar episodes that unfolded across the globe during this period. This ecological friction was the consequence of a global restructuring of ecosystems and the lives of human and non-human communities, and it revealed how economic and imperial undertakings produced collateral, unexpected effects, such as the introduction of a beetle that, seen through a multispecies lens, could ultimately undermine colonial projects from below. The proliferation of the rhinoceros beetle in this history shows not only how important it is for scholars to account for non-human agency in the history of capitalism and imperialism (fields that are still highly anthropocentric), but also demonstrates that global environmental history and more-than-human approaches, alongside multispecies ethnography, are fundamental heuristic tools for expanding and diversifying our understanding of ‘human’ societies.

The rhinoceros beetle outbreak and the eradication campaign that followed exposed the fragility of colonial rule and the coconut business, while also opening up multispecies spaces of resistance for Samoans. While contingent, this multispecies ‘alliance’—echoing what Chao describes among Marind communities in West Papua—was central to the rearrangements of ecosystems and species, labour regimes, and colonial power in German Samoa. This article has first denaturalised the economic processes and environmental conditions that turned the rhinoceros beetle into a ‘pest’ and second, has rematerialised the physical dynamics and social more-than-human interactions between, on the one side, this insect, thousands of palm trees, the fungus Metarrhizium anisopliae, and many other non-human beings and, on the other, entomologists, Samoans, Chinese contract labourers, colonial administrators, and planter magnates. ‘Capitalism’, as Alyssa Battistoni argues, ‘inadvertently orders, and reorders, relationships among many human beings along many dimensions [… and] it reorganizes, too, the relationships of the more-than-human world’.Footnote ¹²¹ A granular analysis such as one focused on the rhinoceros beetle in the coconut plantation worlds in German Samoa and the Pacific illustrates the methodological significance of writing a multispecies history of global capitalism.

The history of capitalism and environmental history are now well-established and invigorated fields, after decades of thriving scholarship. While they acknowledge each other’s advancements, these fields have largely developed along parallel paths, without their methodologies and approaches intersecting sufficiently. As I have proposed in this article, a productive and suitable framework for better understanding the expansion of capitalism and its environmental dynamics is historical research into ecological frictions and their responses, including techno-scientific ‘fixes’, such as the transimperial emergence of economic entomology discussed here. The framing of ecological frictions enhances methodological exchanges between these historiographies—exchanges that are often invoked but less frequently substantiated. Whereas ‘the environment’ or ‘nature’ has usually been treated as a backdrop in histories of capitalism—understood as raw materials, resources, conditions of productivity, or passive objects of extraction—environmental historians have tended to prioritise the ecological consequences of human interventions, such as deforestation, greenhouse emissions, or water pollution, sometimes at the cost of neglecting the social and economic configurations involved in these processes, with ‘capitalism’ remaining a black box for explaining the formation of our world. By placing the rhinoceros beetle at the centre of the historical account, this article retraces the life of this 35–50 mm-long insect across the Pacific archipelago and imperial infrastructures. In doing so, it bridges core questions in those historiographies: why forms of capitalism evolve in ever-intensifying ways, colonising territories, commodifying natural resources, and enforcing extractive labour; and how these processes were integral elements of longer environmental and planetary dynamics that, at times, challenged and resisted the very logics and ecologies of extraction and production. These questions speak also to the more urgent concerns about the future of human and non-human habitability on this planet.