Research project

The project examines the entanglements of the pharmaceutical industry with the colonial and postcolonial world. Starting point is the history of the alkaloid quinine which was closely linked to colonial rule. Not only did it save Europeans in the tropics from malaria. Also, since the late 19th century, European, American, and not least the German pharma companies received the raw material for its production, the bark of cinchona trees (mostly the variant Cinchona Ledgeriana), from colonial plantations.  In the 1930s, 90 percent of all cinchona trees grew on plantations in the Dutch East Indies. Colonial rule, therefore, secured pharmaceutical companies’ supply with resources. Decolonization destroyed this arrangement: In the wake of independence, in Asia and Africa new actors entered the world stage who pursued alternative ideas about how production and distribution of drugs and the world economy in general should look like.

Taking production, distribution, and consumption of cinchona bark and the alkaloid quinine as an example, the project analyses how pharmaceutical companies acted in the colonial and postcolonial world. At its center are the Dutch East Indies / Indonesia and the Belgian Congo/ Zaire as the most important colonial and postcolonial producers of cinchona bark and eminent manufacturers of quinine. Putting the alleged periphery of the world economy into the center of the analysis, opens a new perspective on the pharmaceutical industry and its connections with the colonial and postcolonial world, which were more important than usually thought. Non-European actors like postcolonial governments, local landowners, or civil society played a much larger role for the history of the pharma companies. The project views pharmaceutical production as part of a negotiation process between foreign companies, colonial and postcolonial governments, local civil society, and international development organizations. This opens new vistas on political, social, and economic continuity and change in the process of decolonization, on divergent ideas about development, and the unequal access to life-saving drugs.