Abstract
This thesis is about what I call the Dutch Golden Alkaloid Age between roughly the 1850s and 1950s. I follow the historical trajectory of the production and distribution of the anti-febrifuge cinchona bark tree (Cinchona officinalis Lin.) and its most powerful and therapeutically applied alkaloid in the Dutch empire—quinine, an
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antimalarial medicine. During this period, scientists, planters, traders, industrialists and state officials in the Netherlands and the former Dutch colony of the Netherlands Indies cooperated in the establishment of a profitable and exploitable Dutch transoceanic cinchona-quinine enterprise. In this thesis, I show how through a dynamic process of knowledge exchange, innovation, and economic cooperation, a transoceanic network of cinchona planters and traders, quinine industrialists and state-sponsored scientists was established and succeeded in gaining international control over the production and distribution of the raw material cinchona bark. Henceforth, this network came to play a dominant role in the first global pharmaceutical cartel that controlled the industrial production and distribution of the antimalarial medicine quinine. This thesis makes a fundamental contribution to the Dutch historiographies of science and technology, as well as industrialization and colonialism, by showing the necessity of closely connecting Dutch colonial history with Dutch industrial history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and vice versa. By closely looking at how this dynamic process of cooperation, innovation and exchange – branded as colonial agro-industrialism – resulted in establishing a Dutch transoceanic cinchona-quinine network, this thesis provides two new fundamental historiographic insights. First, using the Dutch cinchona-quinine example, this thesis offers a unique insight into the dynamics of the relationships among the pharmaceutical industry, biomedical science, and international public health during an embryonic period for all three fields. Second, with the development of the modern concept of (colonial) agro-industrialism this thesis builds further on the historiographical pre-modern concepts of colonial botany and green imperialism. By connecting the historical narratives of Dutch colonial history with the historical narratives of science and technology and the development of the Dutch nation state we can better understand how colonial and imperial objectives of agro-industrial exploitability and profitability are closely connected with the industrial objectives of creating a profitable and exploitable industry in the motherland.
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