The British mosquito eradication campaign in colonial Lagos, 1902-1950
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The impact of malaria on the demography of European settlers in Lagos from the mid-nineteenth century posed a serious threat to British imperialism in Nigeria. This prompted the British administration to take vigorous measures to address the unsanitary conditions within Lagos, a major causation of the disease. This paper examines the colonial programmes on the eradication of mosquitos in Lagos, the colonial capital of Nigeria. It highlights the political and economic implications of this programme, and the responses of African colonial subjects to the initiative. The government adopted divergent solutions, ranging from racial segregation to swamp reclamation. However, each of these had a downside. Segregation policies, at a time of growing nationalism among an increasingly politically conscious African educated class, would breed political unrest. Swamp reclamation, on the other hand, would require seizing privately owned land and depriving fishermen and wood collectors who earned a living by exploiting the resources of these swamps, critical for their survival and for the colony’s coffers. When the colonial administration finally settled on swamp reclamation, it faced the problem of cost that needed to be balanced with the sacrosanct principle that colonies should be self-sustaining economies and not be a burden to the metropolis. Existing studies have overlooked the resistance or reaction of Lagosians to swamp clearance and forest ordinance. The paper relies on a combination of primary, secondary and oral sources, including a body of archival documents and some interviews.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".