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Feature Endeavour
Building the world’s supply of quinine: Dutch
colonialism and the origins of a global pharmaceutical
industry
Andrew Goss*
History Department, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA 70148, United States
Quinine, a naturally occurring alkaloid from the Cincho-
na tree, was one of the first drugs produced and sold by a
global pharmaceutical industry during the nineteenth
century. Factories in Europe and North America domi-
nated the manufacturing industry, and between 1890
and 1940, Cinchona plantations on Java supplied most of
the bark for the quinine pharmaceutical business. At the
end of the nineteenth century, the Dutch colonial state
kept a hands-off approach to the Cinchona enterprises,
in keeping with its liberal orientation. But the persistent
low-price for bark, which led to the near ruin of the
Cinchona planters, eventually pushed the colonial state
to actively protect the Cinchona plantations. Colonial
officials sought to stabilize the colonial Cinchona export-
business by encouraging the integration of the quinine
industry on a global scale. Most important was the
colonial state’s sponsorship in 1913 of the Quinine
Agreement, establishing a set price for Cinchona bark,
which created the world’s first pharmaceutical cartel. In
the interwar period, an alliance of Dutch government
officials, planters, scientists, doctors and drug-makers,
working in both the motherland and the colony, actively
promoted the expansion of quinine consumption, as
well as the merit of the Quinine Agreement, which they
argued supplied guaranteed a steady supply of quinine,
all for the wellbeing of global humanity.
Until there were effective synthetic anti-malarials in the
late 1940s, quinine was the only reliable treatment for
malaria. The quinine alkaloid kills the malaria parasite in
the human blood stream, causing almost immediate relief
from malarial fevers. In 1900, malaria was still endemic
throughout much of the tropical and subtropical world, and
parts of northwestern Europe and the eastern United
States routinely experienced late summer outbreaks of
malaria. Prices for the medicine fell throughout the nine-
teenth century, and demand for quinine rose steadily until
the 1920s, when campaigns to eradicate the vector of
malaria, the Anopheles mosquito, began to have real suc-
cess. It was truly a wonder drug, quickly and effectively
alleviating humanity’s deadliest disease. And the global
industrial economy of the nineteenth century brought it
within reach of theoretically anyone suffering from malar-
ial fevers.
Quinine was one of the first drugs produced and sold by
a global pharmaceutical industry. Factories processed the
*Tel.: +1 504 280 7249., Goss, A. (agoss@uno.edu).
Available online 25 November 2013
www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ – see front matter ß 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2013.10.002
Vol. 38 No. 1
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bark of Cinchona, extracting the quinine alkaloid, where
they turned it into a salt, quinine sulfate, which was
suitable for medical use. These quinine factories then sold
the quinine salt directly to consumers, and in addition
supplied larger quantities to other drug makers through-
out the world. Making the commodity of quinine was
largely an industrial process, dominated by about a dozen
factories, most of them in Europe, but also in North Amer-
ica and later Asia. The raw material, the Cinchona bark,
came from South America, although after the 1860s the
tree was acclimatized in a number of the European colonies
in Asia and later Africa. Both private and government-
owned plantations grew Cinchona trees, which at maturi-
ty, usually around 18 years, were harvested and stripped of
their bark, which was dried and then shipped to manu-
facturers. Between 1890 and 1940 the Netherlands East
Indies provided over 90% of the world’s supply of the raw
elements for quinine (other sources were Latin America
and British India). This gave the Dutch colony an unusual
and enviable position in the quinine business, but because
of low prices for the bark, failed to produce consistent profit
or prestige until after World War I. Starting in 1910,
colonial officials sought to stabilize the colonial Cinchona
export-business by encouraging the global integration of
the quinine industry. This led to the Quinine Agreement,
which took quinine off the free-market, and established the
first global pharmaceutical cartel. In joining the cartel,
planters, manufacturers and the Dutch colonial state
agreed to cooperate to maintain the viability of the quinine
industry. This created the model for the twentieth century
quinine industry.
The Dutch government, in the colony and at home,
attempted to facilitate a prominent place for the colony’s
bark in the quinine industry, not least because as owners of
the largest plantation of Cinchona on Java, they drew
profit from it as well. How to benefit in the quinine industry
without controlling the manufacturing process was ini-
tially unclear. Moreover, despite the state’s large stake
in its own trees, which originated from the initial govern-
ment-led efforts to acclimatize the Cinchona tree in the
1850s and 1860s, it was mostly Dutch businessmen who
grew Cinchona on privately controlled land (Figures 1–3).
In this way the quinine industry resembled the typical
agricultural export crops of sugar, tobacco, rubber and tea,
which were only loosely regulated by the colonial state at
that time. On Java, tea was often grown right next to
Cinchona on the same plantation, and in both cases native
labor planted, tended and harvested the crop. Despite
 Feature Endeavour Vol. 38 No. 1
Figure 1. Workers on the Cinchona plantation Ramawatie, West Java. Collection
Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, coll. nr. 10012774.
earlier acclimatization efforts being led by government
scientists, by the 1880s, government aid to the Cinchona
planters was minimal. Nonetheless, despite the similari-
ties to other exports crops, the economics of Cinchona were
distinct in two important ways. First, turning Cinchona
bark into a viable global commodity is far more costly and
complex than the comparable process for creating market-
able tea, rubber or tobacco. Second, the demand for quinine
was limited to its single purpose use in treating malarial
fever. Even as the price of medical quinine dropped rapidly
after 1890, as a result of an overabundant supply of
Cinchona bark, consumer demand grew only slowly. The
Dutch Cinchona industry survived and thrived after 1910
due to the Dutch colonial efforts to foster the global inte-
gration of the quinine industry.
Quinine, empire and the history of science
Scholarship has long recognized that science has been part
of the modern story of quinine. Fiammetta Rocco, in the
second half of her fine narrative book about quinine and
Figure 2. Harvesting and Drying Cinchona bark, Cinyiruan government plantation,
c. 1880.
Reprinted from J.C. Bernelot Moens, De Kinacultuur in Azië, 1854 t/m 1882
(Batavia: Ernst, 1882).
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9
Figure 3. Workers packing Cinchona bark on Java for shipment to Amsterdam.
Collection Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, coll. nr. 10012686.
malaria, shows how starting with the publication of
Charles-Marie de La Condamine’s publication of Sur
l‘Arbre du Quinquina in 1738, naturalists were the world’s
first cinchona experts, publishing descriptions of the dif-
fering species of the tree.1 It was two chemists, Pierre
Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou who in
1820 isolated two of cinchona’s alkaloids, including one
they called quinine. In the 1840s, Europeans began their
efforts to acclimatize Cinchona in the European colonies of
Asia, botanists and other naturalists played an important
role in creating colonial plantations, where they led the
effort to create Cinchona as a colonial export crop. The
adventures of naturalists such as Clements Markham,
Justus Hasskarl and Charles Ledger, who ventured to
the Andean mountains, consciously treading in Alexander
von Humboldt’s footsteps and smuggling specimens and
seeds out, led in the 1860s and 1870s to British, French and
Dutch Cinchona plantations that eventually supplied most
of the world’s quinine.2 Starting around the turn of the
twentieth century, public health doctors and medical scien-
tists played a wide-spread role in promoting the use of
quinine in the eradication of malaria.3
Recently historians have demonstrated that imperial
scientific networks, operating between Europe and the
Asian colonies, led the acclimatization of Cinchona in
the middle of the nineteenth century, and are thus critical
to the history of quinine. Over 30 years ago, Lucille Brock-
way used the role of the colonial naturalist in Cinchona
acclimatization work to prove the entanglement of science
with imperial power.4 Richard Drayton has shown that in
the 1860s and 1870s, the academic botanists at Kew
Gardens became the champions of a British quinine initia-
tive in India. European governing bodies trusted then that
science could lead the effort to acclimatize Cinchona.5
1
Fiammetta Rocco, Quinine, Malaria and the Quest for a Cure that Changed the
World (New York: Perennial, 2004).
2
Mark Honigsbaum, Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001).
3
Paul Russell, Man’s Mastery of Malaria (London: Oxford University Press, 1955).
4
Lucille Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal
Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979).
5
Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Im-
provement’ of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 206–11.
10 Feature Endeavour Vol. 38 No. 1
British naturalists, operating out of Kew Gardens, sought
to use the acclimatization of Cinchona as a means for
expanding the power and prestige of both science and
empire.6 The British Empire, as it expanded and settled
around the globe, and especially in Africa and India,
became a major consumer of quinine, and demand for
the drug expanded steadily after 1840.7 For the
Netherlands East Indies, the earliest Cinchona acclimati-
zation projects were failures, as cultivating quinine-rich
Cinchona was a finicky business, one in which the bota-
nists who began the effort ultimately failed. Only when
Dutch colonial scientists concentrated on creating a viable
system that brought scientists, planters and the state
together in one concerted effort, did the Cinchona export
begin to show real results in the 1870s. This led in the next
two decades to the Netherlands East Indies dominating
the global supply of Cinchona bark.8
And what happened to the quinine business after these
initial Cinchona acclimatization efforts bore fruit? The gen-
eral contours of the story are known, with the quinine
business growing rapidly, but historians have shown much
less interest in this period’s history of quinine. This is a
serious oversight – although the origins of quinine as a
product of science and empire in the middle of the nine-
teenth century is a critical part of quinine’s story, that was
only the first phase of the history of quinine as a global
pharmaceutical drug. I suspect two reasons explain the
neglect of post-1880 quinine history. First, the link between
science and Cinchona acclimatization did weaken starting
in the 1860s and 1870s. After that, as Cinchona plantations
took their place next to tea and rubber plantations, colonial
scientist became managers and advisors, doing routine
work. With scientists playing just bit-parts, the history of
science narrative of quinine production loses focus. Instead,
it is increasingly an economic and business history – and
because as a colonial commodity, quinine did not have the
economic impact of exports such as sugar, tea, coffee and
indigo, economic historians have not been interested in
Cinchona and quinine history. And second, with the collapse
of the Cinchona plantations in the British Empire in the
1880s, and the continued minority status of quinine enthu-
siasts in the French Empire, this is increasingly a story with
Dutch protagonists. It was in the Dutch empire that Cin-
chona and quinine became a success, and most historians
outside of the Netherlands have not been able to use the
Dutch language sources to investigate this history. In this
article, I want to remedy the neglect of this critical phase of
our understanding of quinine, and look at the global history
of quinine between the late 1880s and 1942.
Dutch Cinchona
The earliest Dutch Cinchona initiatives of the 1850s and
1860s were led by romantic naturalists, cut out of the same
6
Kavita Philip, Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial
South Asia (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
7
Philip Curtin, The Image of Africa-British Ideas and Actions, 1780–1850 (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964) and Michael Gelfand, Rivers of Death in
Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). The French empire, on the other
hand, did not enthusiastically adopt quinine prophylaxis, William B. Cohen, ‘Malaria
and French Imperialism,’ Journal of African History 24 (1983), 23–36.
8 13
Andrew Goss, The Floracrats: State-Sponsored Science and the Failure of the
Enlightenment in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 33–58.
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cloth as Clements Markham. The central figure was Franz
Junghuhn, known as the Humboldt of Java.9 He oversaw
the planting of more than one million Cinchona trees, none
of which, however, had quinine rich bark. This embarras-
sing failure to grow trees rich in quinine, which was aired
in the Dutch parliament in the early 1860s, led to a new
approach after his death in 1864. In particular, official
scientists replaced romantic naturalists, and the goal was
not growing trees, but creating a viable Cinchona export
economy. The eventual success of the Dutch empire Cin-
chona initiatives derived from the work of K.W. van Gor-
kom, who between 1864 and 1875 led the Dutch colonial
Government Cinchona Estate at Cinyiruan in West Java.
But he also nurtured Dutch entrepreneurs, who were
beginning to plant Cinchona saplings on private estates.
Starting in 1866, Van Gorkom began providing these
private planters with young Cinchona trees, free of
charge.10 Van Gorkom selected for distribution and further
propagation cuttings and seeds from the most quinine-rich
trees. After 1872 this was in particular those that origi-
nated form the seeds collected in South America by Charles
Ledger in the 1860s.11 By the end of the decade, quinine
contents of more than 10% were common in mature trees
grown from the original Ledger stock–this percentage was
much higher than the average content of cinchona bark
originating in British India or even South America. Van
Gorkom’s success as a scientific bureaucrat earned him a
promotion to the post of government official overseeing the
entire export-crop agriculture in the Netherlands East
Indies.
To be sure, for Van Gorkom, science was still the critical
expert knowledge needed for running a successful Cincho-
na planation. In 1882 he wrote: ‘Thirty years ago, ideas
about the origin, differences, use and application of Cin-
chona, were very vague; they formed a mere chaos of
contradictions. Little by little, this state of things has come
to an end; in proportion as the field for important inves-
tigations was enlarged and sufficiently extended to admit
of observation [sic] and attention to the most important
phenomena, a clearer light was shed over the whole.’12 Van
Gorkom worked in the enlightenment scholarly tradition of
revealing the workings of nature; and he continued a
nineteenth century Dutch scientific tradition of seeing
his work as providing useful knowledge to a wider public.13
For Van Gorkom, Cinchona was principally a colonial
commodity that science helped make possible, but he
measured the success of the endeavor in terms of the price
Cinchona bark, grown by private planters, fetched on the
Amsterdam market.
9
The best biographical treatment of Junghuhn is Rob Nieuwenhuys and Frits
Jaquet, Java’s Onuitputtelijke Natuur: Reisverhalen, tekeningen en fotografieen van
Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn (Alphen aan de Rijn: Sijthoff, 1980). See also Goss, The
Floracrats, 35–46.
10
A. Groothoff, De Kinacultuur (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1912), 18. Planters
received trees gratis from the colonial state until 1883.
11
See for example, K.W. van Gorkom, ‘Cinchona Cultivation after Junghuhn’s
Death,’ in Science and Scientists in he Netherlands East Indies, edited by Pieter Honig
and Frans Verdoorn (New York: Board for the Netherlands Indies, Surinam, and
Curacao, 1945), 196–203.
12
K.W. van Gorkom, A Handbook of Cinchona Culture (Amsterdam: J.H. Bussy,
1883), 2.
Bert Theunissen, ‘Nut en nog eens nut’: Wetenschapsbeelden van Nederlandse
natuuronderzoekers (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000).
 Feature Endeavour Vol. 38 No. 1
Starting with Van Gorkom, the advancement of the
Cinchona industry was to be built on improving the chemi-
cal understanding of the trees. This was formalized in
1872, when the government established a dedicated labo-
ratory on the government plantation grounds for the
manufacturing of quinine alkaloids, to be overseen by
the chemist J.C. Bernelot Moens.14 Once Bernelot Moens
became director of the Government Cinchona Estate after
Van Gorkom’s promotion in 1875, the government scien-
tists referenced chemistry, and not botany, as the science
that made the Cinchona crop possible. In 1882, Bernelot
Moens wrote: ‘Probably never has the usefulness of chem-
istry for a component of agriculture been demonstrated so
brilliantly as with the cultivation of Cinchona.’15 For ex-
ample, in collaboration with Dutch academic chemists, the
experiment station developed a systematic, and secret,
method for analyzing the alkaloid content of bark samples.
It was this procedure that anchored their expertise, and
established the main criteria for analyzing cultivation
techniques. The government scientists offered various
kinds of support to the Cinchona plantations – in addition
to supplying seeds and saplings, they also provided advice
about cultivation, harvest and preparing the bark for
export. The government quinine scientists published arti-
cles meant to serve the plantations, for example about the
quinine content in bark as a factor of its age, recommend-
ing optimum ages for harvest.16
At the end of the nineteenth century, there were just
over 100 Cinchona plantations in the Netherlands East
Indies, mostly in the mountains of West Java. By then,
each planter had a full rotation of trees, as it became
standard to harvest an entire tree between 15 and 18 years
of growth. And even as the percentage of quinine in the
trees continued to grow steadily, the amount of cinchona
bark being shipped to Europe from Java increased from
124,000 kg in 1880 to 2,901,000 kg in 1890, more than a 20-
fold increase. It was at this time that the price for cinchona
bark began to drop dramatically; cinchona exports from
British–Indian plantations were in the 1880s greater than
from the Dutch colony.17 By the end of the decade, lower
profits led to the majority of British colonial cinchona
planters harvesting their entire crop and dumping it on
the European market, as they shifted to tea. With the
millions of kilograms of bark flooding the European market
after the mid-1880s, the market became over-saturated
and supply was greater than the demands for processed
quinine. This led to a dramatic crisis amongst the Dutch
planters, as they struggled to survive financially. They
managed to survive at a time of falling prices because
unlike their British counterparts, they were able to in-
crease annually both the quantity of bark harvested and
the quality, in terms of quinine content. Nonetheless, they
struggled financially; their low point came in 1896 when
14
‘Kinakultuur. Inrigting tot bereiding van ruwe gemengde kina-alkaloiden,’
Besluit March 22, 1872/18, in Staatsblad van Nederlandsch-Indië voor het jaar
1872 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1873), no. 57.
15
Quoted in M.J. Sirks, Indisch natuuronderzoek (Amsterdam: Ellermans/Harms,
1915), 233.
16
K.W. van Gorkom, ‘Cinchona in Java from 1872 to 1907,’ Agricultural Ledger 17,4
(1912): 35–106.
17
Groothoff, De kinakultuur, 96. Smaller amounts were also still coming from
Bolivia and Peru.
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11
the price dropped to half what it had been five years
earlier.18 With abundant supplies of high-quality bark
available in Europe, the initiative passed to the manufac-
turers of quinine, all of whom in the 1880s were in either
Europe or North America.
Planters versus manufacturers
After they pioneered the process to isolate quinine in 1820
using alcohol and sulfuric acid, the pharmacists Pelletier
and Caventou began manufacturing quinine sulfate in the
laboratory. Pelletier published the straightforward pro-
cess, and other European pharmacists quickly followed
his lead.19 Prices for quinine dropped quickly, and through-
out the nineteenth century, manufacturing increased
steadily, utilizing bark harvested in South America.20
Increasingly this was being done at an industrial scale
and no longer in the workshops of individual pharmacists.
With the dramatic increase of cinchona supplies in the
1880s, pharmaceutical quinine factories in Europe expand-
ed, leading to larger supplies of now comparatively cheap
quinine sulfate. Manufacturing started in the Netherlands
with the founding of the NV Amsterdamsche Chininefab-
riek in 1881. Consumer demand also continued to grow in
the 1880s, although not as quickly as the supply in bark. As
a result, quinine sulfate prices stabilized even as quinine
bark prices continued to drop. The European manufac-
turers formed a trade syndicate in 1892, with the explicit
purpose of keeping the auction price of the bark low, while
raising the sale price for quinine sulfate. The manufac-
turers were successful on both counts, and in the 1890s,
quinine sulfate prices increased at the same time that
Cinchona bark went down in price.21 For the first time,
the European manufacturers, and not the bark suppliers,
held the advantageous position in the quinine industry.
Especially the large factories in Germany prospered,
where production volumes were continuing to increase.
The German manufacturers Chininfabrik Braunschweig
and Chinifabrik Auerbach increased their production ten-
fold from about 10,000 kg of quinine sulfate in 1882 to
about 100,000 kg in 1892.22 Many of the planters in the
Netherlands East Indies came to believe that the manu-
facturers had private agreements to purchase greater
amounts of bark than they could use to manufacture or
market quinine sulfate, in an effort to further drive down
the price of Cinchona bark.23
By the early 1890s, the colonial government reap-
praised its hands off approach to the cinchona economy.
This crisis over low prices reached the government’s at-
tention in 1893. In Holland, the Dutch Minister of Colonies
18
Statistiek van Kina en Kinine: Voorstel tot uitbreeding der bestaande of bouw eener
tweede kinine-fabriek(Batavia: Albrecht, 1901). Prices for quinine were figured per
unit of quinine alkaloid in bark. One unit was 1% quinine content in ½ kilogram of
bark.
19
Groothoof, De kinacultuur, 86.
20
James Webb, Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 106–114.
21
Groothoff, De kinacultuur, 87. The depression of the 1880s and early 1890s
lowered both prices and need. In 1895 the unit-price of processed quinine was ten-
times less than it had been a decade earlier. Anton Hogstad, ‘The Three Hundredth
Anniversary of the First Recognized Use of Cinchona,’ in Proceedings of the Celebra-
tion of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the First Recognized Use of Cinchona (St.
Louis: Missouri Botanical Gardens, 1931), 1–3.
22
Von Winning, Consumptie van Kinine (Batavia: Dorp, 1893), 5.
23
Ibid., 5.
12 Feature Endeavour Vol. 38 No. 1
W.K. baron van Dedem asked the quinine traders and
manufacturers to explain the low price for bark.24 In the
same year on Java, the quinine planters formally
requested that the government intervene in the market,
by ceasing the sale of government bark, and decreasing, as
well as temporarily eliminating, any land taxes on Cin-
chona growers.25 And while the Minister of Colonies had
already rejected stopping the sale of government bark,26
the planters request led to an extensive investigation by
the colonial government. In the end, Governor General
C.H.A. van der Wijck kept the taxes on Cinchona estates,
reasoning that the problems of the Cinchona planters were
due to overproduction of the bark. Government interven-
tion in the market operation would not solve the overpro-
duction problem, he argued, unless the entire Cinchona
export threatened to collapse. He concluded lower prices
would inevitably force Cinchona producers out of the
market, and ‘offering artificial remedies will only slow
down, and not prevent, the natural course of things.’27
His decision was largely in keeping with the liberalism
that animated Dutch colonial policy at the end of the
nineteenth century.
In ruling out help to the planters, the Governor General
went against the advice of then acting director of the
Government Cinchona Estate, the chemist P. Van Leer-
sum, who took on the role of protector of the Cinchona
planters. He had argued that despite the reality of over-
production, the colonial government should do everything
it could to protect and nurture this export crop, including
offering generous tax breaks and even the ceasing to
harvest bark from the Cinchona trees in the government
plantation he managed.28 In losing this argument to the
colonial administration, he likely hastened the marginali-
zation of the Cinchona scientists in setting policy in the
short term. But notably he also made a lengthy attempt to
shift the terms of the debate away from profits toward the
idea of a moral obligation to humanity, and ‘in order to
prevent losing this unusually beautiful page out of our book
of colonial history.’29 These arguments went mostly un-
heard in an environment where formal liberal economic
policies meant minimal government intervention (al-
though the government refused to cease harvesting bark
from its profitable Cinchona estate). But this line of de-
fense would reappear a generation later, when scientists
would be charged with preserving this prestigious element
of Dutch colonialism.
The crisis of the low quinine bark prices pushed the
Cinchona planters into collective organization. Represen-
tatives from eighteen of the private Cinchona plantations
signed the 1893 letter petitioning the Governor General for
24
Van Dedem to Kamer van Koophandel en Fabrieken in Amsterdam en Rotterdam,
March 13, 1893, in Verbaal no. 8, file 4680, Archief Ministerie van Koloniën, 1851–
1900, NA, The Hague.
25
Tiederman van Kerschen et al. to C.H.A. van der Wijck, August 4, 1893, in Verbaal
December 6, 1894, no. 19, file 4884, Archief Ministerie van Kolonien, 1851–1900, NA,
The Hague.
26
Van Dedem to Pijnacker Hordijk, 8 May, 1893, Verbaal no. 51, file 4698, Archief
Ministerie van Koloniën, 1851–1900, The Hague.
27
Van der Wijck to Van Dedem, 3 May, 1894, no. 787a/16, in Verbaal December 6,
1894, no. 19, file 4884, Archief Ministerie van Kolonien, 1851–1900, NA, The Hague.
28
Van Leersum to Harders, October 3, 1893, no. 103, in Verbaal December 6, 1894,
no. 19, file 4884, Archief Ministerie van Kolonien, 1851–1900, NA, The Hague.
29
Ibid.
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government intervention.30 More formally, in 1894 the
plantation owners received royal approval for a Dutch
lobbying group. Located in Amsterdam, this Dutch associ-
ation, the Vereeniging ter Bervordering van de Belangen
der Kinacultuur (Association for the Advancement of the
Interests of the Quinine Cultivation), was open to Dutch
Cinchona planters, both private owners and investors of a
corporate entity.31 As a recognized lobbying group, it wrote
the Minister of Colonies in the summer of 1894, requesting
that the government Cinchona plantation be restored to its
original function providing cuttings and advice only, and
halting harvesting its own bark.32 The arrival of the new
Minister of Colonies J.H. Bergsma in May of 1894 brought
few changes as he promptly confirmed the arrangements
made by his predecessor and the colonial leadership. None-
theless, he left open the possibility of revisiting these
questions at a later time.33
Ironically, it was the crisis of low-prices for quinine
bark, which struck Cinchona planters worldwide, that
allowed the Dutch empire to subsequently dominate the
world supply of Cinchona bark. With the drop in prices,
more and more Cinchona planters in British Ceylon and
India switched to tea, while exports from South America
and Africa dropped as well, and by 1896, 80% of the bark
exports were coming from Java.34 In the early 1890s, the
Amsterdam Cinchona market overtook the one in Lon-
don.35 In 1895, a second public auction house in Amster-
dam began selling Cinchona bark.36 Dutch planters
survived because of the high-quinine content in their
Javanese grown cinchonas, compared to their British coun-
terparts. Moreover, many planters hedged by adding tea
shrubs but keeping their maturing Cinchona trees in the
ground. The Dutch consolidation over the Cinchona supply
was furthered by the creation of the first successful quinine
factory outside of Europe or North America. This private
quinine manufacturing factory was established in Ban-
dung in West Java in 1896, with government blessing
and the promise that they could purchase bark with at
least 500 kg of quinine sulfate from the Government Cin-
chona Estate.37 And by 1898 this factory was selling qui-
nine on the local colonial market (Figure 4). It hailed itself
as a savior of the planters, but initially there was a good
deal of skepticism, as all previous efforts to operate a
quinine factory outside of Europe or North America had
failed.38 It was not only unproven, but also, as a private
manufacturer, was expected to return dividends to its
investors and owners – many planters boycotted its public
auctions in Batavia believing they could get better prices
30
31
Tiederman van Kerschen et al. to C.H.A. van der Wijck, August 4, 1893.
‘Vereeniging ter Bevordering van de Belangen der Kinacultuur,’ De Indische Gids
16, no. 1 (1894), 684.
32
Vereeniging ter Bevordering van de Balangen der Kina-Cultuur to Bergsma, 25
June, 1894, in Verbaal December 6, 1894, no. 19, file 4884, Archief Ministerie van
Koloniën, 1851–1900, NA, The Hague.
33
Bergsma to van der Wijck, Verbaal December 6, 1894, no. 19, file 4884, Archief
Ministerie van Koloniën, 1851–1900, NA, The Hague.
34
L.L.A. Maurenbrechner, Statistiek van kina en kinine: Voorstel tot uitbreeding der
bestaande bouw eener tweede kinine-fabriek (Batavia: Albrecht, 1901), 33.
35
Ibid., 19.
36
Groothoff, De kinacultuur, 96.
37
Van der Wijck to Bergsma, July 26, 1896, no. 1298/6, in Verbaal Oct. 9, 1896, no.
56, file 5091, Archief Ministerie van Koloniën, 1851–1900, NA, The Hague.
38
Beginning in the 1840s, factories were also begun in Bolivia and then in Ooty in
British India in 1871. All these efforts failed after a few years.
 Feature Endeavour Vol. 38 No. 1
Figure 4. Bandung Quinine Factory during the colonial period. Collection
Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, coll. nr. 10012683.
shipping it to Amsterdam. Moreover, the planters were
concerned that if the quinine the Bandung factory sold
locally was substandard, the planters would be blamed. As
a consequence, only a fraction of the bark was offered at the
Batavian auctions.39 Nonetheless, the Bandung factory’s
establishment, alongside the leveling-off of bark supply
(and the continued increase in world-wide quinine con-
sumption), led to the steady increase in prices for bark in
Amsterdam, which in 1900 were quadruple the prices four
years earlier.40 After 1900, the Bandung factory paid
comparable prices for bark compared to the price in
Amsterdam. And with that, the economics of the cinchona
export stabilized, if only briefly.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, quinine
became a technology of imperial expansion. Quinine was
integrated into military medicine, and European colonial
bureaucracies in Africa and Asia increasingly bought it for
their own officials.41 And with the dramatic dip in the price
of quinine after 1880, it came into common usage as an
antimalarial medicine in Europe and North America as
well, including on the American frontier, where European
agricultural colonists brought malaria with them and its
spread continued throughout the twentieth century.42 By
1890, as quinine was used globally as a remedy and
medicine against malarial fevers, it still remained out of
reach for most of the world’s peasant population. In Asia
and Africa, the price of quinine prevented most of the
indigenous population from using it as an antimalarial
medicine.43 Demand for quinine grew only modestly in the
1890s, and there continued to be an excess of Cinchona
bark, even though processed quinine prices in 1895 were
about one-tenth of what they had been in 1880.44 The
inability of most colonial subjects to purchase the medicine
routinely was increasingly noticed after 1900 in all the
39
Maurenbrechner, Statistiek van kina, 27–32.
40
Groothoff, De Kinacultuur, 97.
41
Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire.
42
Webb, Humanity’s Burden, 112–7.
43
Ibid., 122.
44
In Italy, the price of quinine in lire per kilogram fell from 462 lire per kilogram in
1880 to 48 lire per kilogram in 1895. Prices dropped further to 12 lire per kilogram in
1910. Frank Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900–1962 (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2006), 47.
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13
European colonies. Dutch Cinchona planters saw this as a
possible new market for their bark.
By 1905, after a brief period of price stabilization, it was
clear that with the production of cinchona bark growing
faster than demand for finished quinine, the drop in prices
of cinchona bark would continue. The root problem was
still the oversupply of bark. The Bandung factory, at first
hailed as a boon to the colonial industry, had shifted from
its initial purpose of providing a factory for Javanese
planters, to a powerful manufacturer trying to keep the
long-term price of quinine bark low, like the other Europe-
an manufacturers.45 Nonetheless, planters were more
aware than previously that there was a finite demand
for the final product, opening up a possibility of closer
collaboration between planters and manufacturers. In
1910, the planters made another effort to unite their
efforts, and formed the Vereeniging ter Bevordering van
de Belangen van de Kina-Cultuur, or Kinavera.46 But they
continued to have virtually no leverage over the manufac-
turers. The Kinavera admitted that the most rational
solution would be for all Cinchona planters to agree to
supply only what the manufacturers were demanding, but
the difficulty of binding over 100 planters to this was also
acknowledged. Another proposal, perhaps more realistic,
was to increase government support, in particular through
the building of government manufacturing factory on Java,
which with the aid of significant government subsidies
would supply quinine to the local native population.47 This
idea had been in discussion even earlier that year, and was
in part precipitated by the lapsing of the contract that sold
bark from the government Cinchona plantation to the
Bandung factory.48 And although this factory was never
built, the discussions in the government led to a major
rethinking of the problem, which led to the Dutch colonial
effort to global integrated the quinine industry.
After 1910, with the arrival of a new director of the
Department of Agriculture, Trade and Industry, H.J.
Lovink, the colonial government took an increasingly ac-
tive role in managing Cinchona exports. In the next few
years, it was under Lovink’s leadership that the colonial
bureaucracy began to assert greater control over the colo-
nial economy, including Cinchona. Lovink had previously
been the director general of the Dutch Ministry of Agricul-
ture and he arrived with the stated ambition of making
the colonial agricultural economy more productive.49 The
45
It did so by investing its early profits in purchasing large quantities of Javanese
bark at slightly higher-than-market prices, in order to keep long-term bark prices low.
P. van Leersum, ‘Nota handelde over de wenschelijkheid der oprichting van een
Gouvernements Kininefabriek,’ in Verbaal 19 August, 1910, no. 51.
46
Gewijzigde statuten, ‘Vereeniging ter Bevordering van de Belangen der Kina-
Cultuur,’ May 1910, in Verbaal 19 August, 1910, no. 51, file 760, in Archief Ministerie
van Koloniën, Openbaar, 1900–1953, NA, The Hague.
47
Vereeniging ter Bevordering Kina to Lovink, September 8, 1910, in Verbaal,
February 3, 1911/15, file 799, in Archief Ministerie van Koloniën, Openbaar, 1900–
1953, NA, The Hague.
48
Lovink to Idenburg, May 11, 1910/4300, in Verbaal February 3, 1911/15.
49
His most immediate impact was on the native rice economy, through his creation
of an extensive agricultural extension service, staffed by native elites trained at
Lovink’s agricultural schools and colleges. Suzanne Moon, Technology and Ethical
Idealism: A History of Development in the Netherlands East Indies (Leiden: CNWS,
2007). Lovink believed scientific research, especially work like laboratory research or
field investigations, had little meaning to agricultural development, and scientists
were initially shunted aside to the Botanical Gardens. Andrew Goss, ‘Decent colonial-
ism? Pure Science and Colonial Ideology in the Netherlands East Indies, 1910–1929,’
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40,1 (2009): 187–214.
14 Feature Endeavour Vol. 38 No. 1
Figure 5. Display of the Government Quinine Experiment Station at an annual
convention in Bandung. Collection Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, coll. nr.
60004616.
problem of detrimentally low prices for Cinchona bark
quickly drew the attention of Lovink. In 1911, Cinchona
got a dedicated government-sponsored experiment station,
built at the location of Government Cinchona Estate in
West Java (Figure 5).50 The Cinchona planters had with
the creation of Kinevera committed to closer cooperation,
and Lovink had almost immediately after arriving on Java
in 1910 begun to pressure the quinine manufacturers into
accepting a minimum price for Cinchona bark. This was a
difficult negotiation, largely because the manufacturers
continued to have the upper-hand, as there was no short-
age of quinine bark. Lovink’s efforts to shape a more
permanent deal continued and finally in late 1912 and
early 1913, Lovink was able to get an agreement from the
European manufacturers, described below. Why exactly
the manufacturers agreed to this is not entirely clear, but
they apparently were concerned about what Lovink was
planning to do with the bark harvested from the govern-
ment’s numerous plantations. Lovink initially kept all
options open, and quickly began planning for a government
factory, which would process government bark, and which
would operate outside of any future agreement between
the private planters and the European manufacturers.51
This government factory had been discussed since the
1890s, but those plans had been dormant until Lovink’s
arrival in the colony in 1910. The task of planning this
factory fell upon P. Van Leersum, the director of the
Government Cinchona Plantations. In 1910 Van Leersum
traveled to the Netherlands with the charge of developing a
plan for a second quinine factory on Java.
In August of 1910, Van Leersum submitted an extensive
proposal, with budget and long-term planning, for a gov-
ernment quinine factory. The factory would exclusively use
bark from the government estate, and thus would operate
outside of the usual market mechanisms that had devel-
oped since the 1880s. In addition to predicting the contin-
ued low price of bark, which might force the colonial
government to intervene again to save this critical indus-
try, he couched his proposal in terms of the moral impera-
tive to bring the quinine drug to the colony’s native
population.
Only and because of a humanitarian outlook did the
Dutch government spare neither effort nor costs in
bringing the quinine tree to Java. As a result it owns
a flowering enterprise. Still, now rests on her the
obligation to take another step and to bring quinine
to the people. Without its own factory this cannot be
www.sciencedirect.com
even thought of, when the quinine must be made
available as cheap as possible (that is almost at cost
price).52
He then went on to argue that in French Algeria and
British India, colonial authorities had for years been pro-
viding cheap quinine drugs, for the benefit of the local
population, and suggested it was also a Dutch colonial
obligation. The Dutch had only been distributing quinine
during periods of intense outbreaks. Van Leersum argued
that the factory would use his own novel process for
extracting quinine alkaloid. This quinine would be put
into quinine tablets which could be sold locally, with dis-
counts offered to the native population. And because this
would open a new market, it would not adversely affect the
global market price for quinine bark. He even projected
greater profits for the government and likely an overall
higher market price in Amsterdam for Javanese manufac-
turers. He then sketched out an extensive budgetary pro-
posal for an extensive factory able to produce 60,000 kg of
quinine per year.53 Subsequent addenda in 1911 to his
proposal expanded upon the argument that only the colo-
nial government, under the leadership of chemists such as
himself, would be in a position to offer affordable quinine
tablets to the native population.54
Not surprisingly, the planters’ organization Kinavera
reacted very enthusiastically to Van Leersum’s propos-
al.55 Although Lovink, in light of the delicate negotiations
with the quinine manufacturers, suggested the plans be
kept on the shelf for the time-being, in 1912 he asked Van
Leersum to re-activate them. Even as the deal with the
manufacturers was nearing completion, there was intense
planning for an initial factory meant to test Van Leersum’s
idea, which also received Governor General Idenburg’s
enthusiastic support. Despite this support, the factory was
never built as the Minister of Colonies J.H. de Waal
Malefijt halted further planning and spending, in part
because of financial considerations, but also because he
did not have confidence in either Van Leersum or his
projections. He was apparently unmoved by moral argu-
ments in favor of brining affordable quinine to the popu-
lation.56 Moreover the Minister took seriously the claim of
the Bandung Quinine Factory that Van Leersum had
50
Part of the salaries and costs of this scientific expertise and guidance came from
the dues paid by private Cinchona planters. Schoor, Zuivere en toegepaste wetenschap
in de tropen.
51
Lovink to Idenburg, December 3, 1912/11861, in Verbaal 17 March 1913, no. 18,
file 1024, in Archief Ministerie van Koloniën, Openbaar, 1900–1953, NA, The Hague.
The planters had their own concerns initially, because by using its own Cinchona bark
grown nearby, the government factory would have lower costs, yet it might one day sell
the quinine on the world market, potentially undercutting prices offered by the
European manufacturers.
52
P. van Leersum, ‘Nota handelde over de wenschelijkheid der oprichting van een
Gouvernements Kininefabriek,’ 10 May, 1910, in Verbaal 19 August, 1910, no. 51.
53
Ibid.
54
Van Leersum to Lovink, March 6, 1911/36D, in Verbaal 17 March 1913, no. 18.
Further revisions by Van Leersum greatly reduced the capacity of the proposed factory
to 12,000 kg per year. Van Leersum to Lovink, July 29, 1911/108/D, in Verbaal 17
march 1913, no. 18.
55
Vereeniging ter bevordering der Belangen van de Kinacultuur to J.Th.Viehof,
June 8, 1910, in Verbaal 19 August, 1910, no. 51.
56
De Waal Malefijt to Idenburg, Verbaal 17 March 1913, no. 18. In his ruling, De
Waal Malefijt also cited as a possible negative consequence the likelihood that the
government factory would compete with the private Bandung factory.
 Feature Endeavour Vol. 38 No. 1
illicitly developed his extraction procedure after observing
it in the laboratory of the Bandung factory a few years
earlier, although that particular claim had been largely
discounted by the colonial bureaucracy.57 That ended
discussion of a government quinine factory. Nonetheless,
in the Indies, Van Leersum’s place in the quinine industry
was enhanced, and his arguments that the quinine enter-
prise was more than a business, but a moral imperative,
became an important part of Dutch defense of their new
quinine agreement.
The 1913 Quinine Agreement, initially established for
a three-year period, but renewed continuously until the
Japanese invasion of the Indies, took Cinchona bark as a
commodity off the open-market. The statutes were
drafted by the leaders of the planters’ organization,
Kinevra, who negotiated with the manufacturers in early
1913. But as a major supplier of Cinchona bark, the
government would be party to the agreement as well.58
The 1913 agreement set a minimum price for Cinchona
bark, prevented planters from selling to other manufac-
turers, and penalized manufacturers who bought
cheaper quinine in London or elsewhere. The key mech-
anism for ensuring was pre-agreement over the amount
of bark that would be bought by manufacturers from the
planters.59 Initially eight of the world’s quinine factories
signed the agreement, and they agreed to purchase all
the Javanese bark up to the amount that would produce
525 tons of quinine sulfate for the price of five Dutch
cents per unit.60 The Cinchona Agreement further creat-
ed the so-called Quinine Bureau, headquartered in
Amsterdam, whose board was represented equally by
planters and manufacturers. The principle responsibility
of the Quinine Bureau was to execute the Agreement by
monitoring the sales in Amsterdam.61 The Bandung
factory was party to the agreement as well, and with
the stipulation that it could purchase bark at a slightly
reduced price. From 1913 until 1942, Cinchona bark, and
by extension quinine, was a commodity subject to partial
control and prices set by Dutch colonial interests, includ-
ing not just the planters in Java but also the colonial
government.
Quinine and public health
After World War I, the quinine business would enter a
distinct new phase, once it became part of one of the first
global public health initiatives, the war against malaria.
Especially amongst European malariologists, quinine was
an important weapon in the fight to control, and possibly
eradicate, malaria. The notion that quinine was more than
just a therapeutic treatment against the malarial fever,
but an integral part of the elimination of malaria, was still
novel, even if prophylactic use by soldiers during wartime
57
S. Camphuis to Lovink, July 17, 1912, in Verbaal 17 March 1913, no. 18.
58
Lovink to Idenburg, January 10, 1913/362, in Verbaal 24 February, 1913, no. 9, file
1012, in Archief Ministerie van Koloniën, Openbaar, 1900–1953, NA, The Hague.
59
‘Ontwerp Overeenkomst,’ in Verbaal 24 February, 1913, no. 9, file 1012.
60
Cinchona (Buitenzorg: Department of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, n.d.),
10.
61
Norman Taylor, ‘Chapters in the History of Cinchona: Modern Developments,’ in
Science and Scientists in the Netherlands East Indies, edited by Pieter Honig and
Frans Verdoorn (New York: Board for the Netherlands Indies, Surinam, and Curacao,
1945), 203–7.
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15
and colonial officials had become increasingly common in
the nineteenth century. Robert Koch, Nobel Prize winner
and pioneering microbiologist, after conducting research in
German New Guinea in 1900, proposed a regimen of
quinine usage for all malaria infected individuals in areas
of high malaria suffering. He argued that widespread use
of quinine would not only cure individuals, by killing the
malaria plasmodia, but if ingested by all infected individ-
uals, would break the cycle of reinfection and could lead,
perhaps in short order, to the elimination of malaria.62 The
‘Koch method’ was attempted in particular in the Mediter-
ranean as part of increasingly systematic government
efforts to stem malaria. Most importantly, the Italian
physician Angelo Celli encouraged widespread quinine
usage, which was backed by a government which ran a
state quinine service after 1900.63 The Italian experience
combatting malaria before World War I, which emphasized
social treatment through extensive quinization, became a
template for European policy after the war.64 And with
national public health campaigns came government pur-
chases, which greatly expanded the possible market for the
quinine drug. Thus it was these public health campaigns
that fueled the growth of the global quinine pharmaceuti-
cal business.
For the Dutch colonial interests, the years after the war
brought increased opportunities as quinine became central
to especially European efforts to mitigate the effects of
malaria, but also created heightened scrutiny of the Qui-
nine Agreement. The First World War greatly disturbed
the quinine industry, and by 1917, quinine production had
dropped to less than 20% of its pre-war height, despite
heightened demand by all the war’s combatants. With
world-wide trade disrupted, through Allied blockades pre-
venting bark flow into Germany, and difficulties trading
between neutral Netherlands and Germany (where most
European quinine factories were located), quinine manu-
facturers were hard-pressed to secure adequate supplies of
the bark. Bark prices went up also, though, and the plan-
ters on Java survived as a result. Production stabilized in
the early 1920s, with bark prices higher than they had
been before the war.65 Moreover, the war had greatly
expanded malaria infections world-wide, and epidemic
outbreaks continued throughout the 1920s in Italy, the
Balkans, Greece, the Middle East and Russia.66 The Lea-
gue of Nations in 1924 set up the Malaria Commission,
headquartered in Geneva, with the explicit purpose of
developing international policies and procedures to combat
malaria. And the first major report of the Malaria Com-
mission in 1924 strongly advocated public health officials’
use of quinine in treating all cases of malaria.67 Although
US public health officials, driven by the Rockefeller Foun-
dation’s approach to malaria, believed that quinine was
largely irrelevant in their quest to eradicate malaria
through mosquito control, most European public health
62
Harrison, Mosquitos, Malaria and Man, 172–3.
63
Ibid., 174 and Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria, 38–52.
64
Hughes Evans, ‘European Malaria Policy in the 1920s and 1930s: The Epidemi-
ology of Minutiae,’ Isis 80, no. 1 (1989): 40–59.
65
M. Émile Perrot, Quinquina et Quinine (Paris: Presses Universitairés de France,
1926).
66
Webb, Humanity’s Burden, 139–45.
67
Evans, ‘European Malaria Policy,’ 45–7.
16 Feature Endeavour Vol. 38 No. 1
officials and scientists continued to value quinine as a
premier weapon against malaria.68 In that context, the
high market price of quinine, which put it out of reach of
most of peasants, was identified by many European malar-
iologists as a persistent problem in combating the disease.
As such, the Quinine Agreement and the Quinine Bureau
came under attack for their role in keeping prices high. And
the blame extended to Dutch colonial government, which
was criticized for promoting monopolistic and mercantile
practices.69 Although as Jim Webb has pointed out recent-
ly, the Quinine Agreement largely stabilized the erratic
sector, and meant a more predictable supply and price for
the drug.70
The advantages of the Quinine Agreement became clear
to the bark producers as the price continued to rise, from
about f.8.00 per kilo before 1913 to an average of f.17.24 per
kilo in the years between 1913 and 1918, to an average
price of f.25.96 per kilo in the five years after the end of
World War I.71 The goals of the Quinine Bureau in the
1920s was to further consolidate theses gains, as it suited
both the bark producers and the manufacturers to try to
work on improving demand for quinine. Starting in the
1920s, the Quinine Bureau actively promoted and adver-
tised the varied uses of quinine.72 In the 1920s this includ-
ed special contracts with national governments and their
public health bureaus, negotiated by the Quinine Bureau
on behalf of the manufacturers. This included a deal in
1924 for 50,000 kg of quinine for the Soviet Union to fight
the malaria epidemic then raging in the lower Volga river
valley.73 The Quinine Bureau also lobbied the League of
Nations Malaria Commission directly.74 This led to a two-
tiered price system, with discounts provided to national
public health services.75
Of particular importance was convincing the League of
Nations and its Malaria Commission that quinine should be
administered broadly to defeat malaria. The Quinine Bu-
reau in 1924 and 1925 distributed a compendium of scien-
tific articles and reprints, and many of the essays
highlighted the importance of quinine in the League of
Nations’ fight against malaria.76 Herein they argued that
quinine was not just for those suffering from fevers, but was
an integral part of the public health initiatives to combat
malaria. This should mean quinine doses for everyone,
including those with no symptons, in an area of endemic
malaria. In 1924, the Quinine Bureau’s Dr. Camphuis spoke
68
Patrick Zylberman, ‘A Transatlantic Dispute: The Etiology of Malaria and the
Redesign of the Mediterranean Landscape,’ in Shifting Boundaries of Public Health:
Europe in the Twentieth Century, eds. Susan Gross Solomon, Lion Murard, and Patrick
Zylberman (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 269–289.
69
This interpretation has persisted. Daniel Headrick refers to the Quinine Bureau
as a marketing cartel in his, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperi-
alism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 72.
70
Webb, Humanity’s Burden, 149–50.
71
‘Notulen van de vergadering van het kinabureau,’ October 1, 1924, no. 14,
Kerbosch collection, KITLV, Leiden.
72
Vereeniging ter bevordering van de kinacultuur, ‘Jaarverslaag over 1925,’ no. 12,
Kerbosch collection, KITLV, Leiden.
73
‘Notulen van de vergadering van het kinabureau,’ May 1, 1924, no. 14, Kerbosch
collection, KITLV, Leiden.
74
Ibid.
75
Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of
Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press), 236.
76
Chinium: Scriptiones Collectae, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Bureau tot Bevordering van
het Kinine-Gebruik, 1924) and Chinium: Scriptiones Collectae, vol. 2 (Amsterdam:
Bureau tot Bevordering van het Kinine-Gebruik, 1925).
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directly with Norman White, then Epidemic Commissioner
of the League of Nations, attempting to correct what Cam-
phuis identified as mistaken conclusions by the Hygiene
Committee of the League of Nations.77 While these efforts
were never entirely successful, and mass quinization was
rejected in the first report of the Malaria Commission in
1924, the commission repeatedly reaffirmed the importance
of quinine as the premier therapeutic treatment.78
Although the Quinine Bureau spent considerable efforts
trying to increase consumption, it realized that this was
governed not by individual consumer behavior – low priced
and abundant quinine supplies had not led to greatly
expanded demand. M. Kerbosch, then director of the Gov-
ernment Cinchona Estate, made this point explicitly in a
1940 article.
Its exclusively medicinal application implies that
there is only a limited market. The conditions are
altogether different from those that could be brought
about in the case of, say, tea or rubber by advertising,
by which people can be persuaded to drink tea in-
stead of other drinks or to use rubber in preference to
other raw materials.79
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Dutch quinine lobbyists
attempted to position quinine as the principle method of
fighting malaria and possibly other diseases as well. In
this context, the sales propaganda division of the Quinine
Bureau’s sponsored a collection of book and pamphlets
extolling the medical and scientific value quinine, point-
ing to a wide range of medical and therapeutic uses. In
1934 an internal report noted that ‘The scientific propa-
ganda intends to keep the eyes of the medical world fixed
on quinine . . . [and] to point out the use of quinine in
fighting and preventing also other diseases.’80 They spon-
sored the publication of pamphlets and books, including
amongst others the books Malaria and Quinine in 1927
and Malaria and the Child from 1932.81 In 1924 they sent
a pamphlet (in French, German and English editions)
extolling the use of quinine for illnesses other than ma-
laria to 8160 university medical professors throughout
the world.82
In the 1920s, when the quinine market was linked to
public health initiatives, the Quinine Agreement, and in
particular the Dutch monopoly on the bark supply, was
criticized by other European countries as making true
public health initiatives cost-prohibitive. The French
and British colonial governments re-invested in efforts
to increase Cinchona production, which included in British
India the planting of Cinchona trees grown from the Led-
ger stock provided by Kerbosch. None of these efforts,
though, managed to create profitable plantations capable
77
‘Notulen van de vergardering,’ May 1, 1924.
78
Evans, ‘European Malaria Policy,’ 46, 50.
79
Kerbosch, ‘Notes on the Cultivation of Cinchona,’ 20T.
80
‘Kort overzicht van de werkzaamheden van het Kina-Bureau ter bevordering van
den afzet,’ Sept. 29, 1934, no 28, Kerbosch collection, KITLV, Leiden.
81
Malaria and Quinine (Amsterdam: Bureau tot Bevordering van het Kinine-
Gebruik, 1927) and Malaria and the Child (Amsterdam: Bureau tot Bevordering
van het Kinine-Gebruik, 1932).
82
‘Kort overzicht.’
 Feature Endeavour Vol. 38 No. 1
Figure 6. M. Kerbosch sampling bark from one of the original Cinchona ledgeriana
trees in the Cinyiruan Government Cinchona Estate, c. 1930.
Courtesy of the National Herbarium of the Netherlands, Leiden University Branch.
of producing bark for the export market – yields were at
best a quarter of those from the Dutch colonial planta-
tions.83 And as French, British and Belgian efforts to grow
cinchonas on a commercial scale moved forward only slow-
ly, European countries and colonies continued to import
large quantities of quinine made from bark originated in
the Netherlands East Indies.84
The Dutch quinine interests responded in the late 1920s
through the scientific defense of their humanism. This
effort was led by M. Kerbosch, the director of the Govern-
ment Cinchona Estate in Java, and Van Leersum’s succes-
sor, who became the Dutch pitchman for quinine in the
1920s (Figure 6). Kerbosch started this process by rebuild-
ing the reputation of the quinine scientists inside the
colonial government.85 In the 1920s, the colonial state,
the Cinchona planters, and the Quinine Bureau all turned
to him for defense of the Dutch colonial position in the
quinine industry. He Dutch defended the arrangement
against critics not only by pointing to the economic factors
of the Cinchona plantation, but also by explaining that
trusteeship over quinine was in scientific hands. At a
conference in St. Louis in 1930 celebrating 300 years of
cinchona use, Kerbosch gave a presentation about the
83
M. Kerbosch, ‘Notes on the Cultivation of Cinchona and the World Supply of
Quinine,’ International Review of Agriculture 31 (1940): 14T–24T.
84
Ibid., 236–7.
85
See in particular the annual reports of the Government Cinchona Estate after
Kerbosch become director, starting with Verslag van de Gouvernements Kina-Onder-
neming te Tjinjiroean (Bandoeng) over 1916 (Bandoeng: Nix, n.d.).
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17
Dutch Cinchona initiatives, and defended the humanitari-
an component, echoing words his mentor Van Leersum had
used two decades earlier: ‘At great pains and with great
devotion did the Government introduce and encourage the
cultivation of cinchona in Java, not for financial profit but
‘‘humanitatis causa.’’’86 Kerbosch in highlighting the
Dutch work for humanity went on to explain that the
Quinine Bureau distributed quinine at low price to malar-
ia-stricken countries, and that this was a stipulation
insisted upon by the Dutch colonial government.
After 1920 the market for Cinchona bark stabilized, and
after 1924 it began to expand rapidly, turning Cinchona
into a more profitable, and for the Dutch colony thus more
routine, export crop. In 1925 export of quinine bark from
plantations who had signed onto the quinine agreement
increased 10% from the previous year. Kinavera, the con-
sortium of quinine planters, ascribed this increase to ‘the
powerful propaganda being carried out by the Quinine
Bureau.’87 Kinavera, no longer needing to lobby the gov-
ernment directly, ceased collecting dues in 1924.88 In 1927,
the quinine experiment station was fully privatized.89 Still,
the colonial state continued to have both a financial stake
in the quinine business; in 1930 the Cinyiruan Govern-
ment Cinchona Estate recorded a profit of f.474,968.90
Even the economic depression of the 1930s, which dimin-
ished exports and hence profits, did not foretell the end of
Cinchona economy. By 1933, the export quantities were
growing again, although at a lower price than before
1930.91 And in the mid-1930s, the colonial government
recommitted itself to oversight over the sector. This includ-
ed new regulations in 1934 limiting both the planting of
new Cinchona and establishing export quotas.92 The gov-
ernment’s reasserted role was confirmed the following
year, when both the colonial parliament and the Director
of the Department of Economic Affairs affirmed the neces-
sity of the Quinine Agreement, despite it coming under
increasing criticism after 1930.93 With its economic and
legal place confirmed, it was up to the scientists to justify
and explain it.
Conclusion
In the interwar years, when colonialism became less and
less defensible on the global political state, the Dutch, as a
second-tier colonial-power with an undefended Asian em-
pire, were particularly hard-pressed to justify their impe-
rialism. And with the story of quinine, the Dutch had an
opportunity to rewrite the narrative of colonialism – it
became a tale of rational colonialism, where colonial inter-
ests nurtured quinine as a scientific commodity, all for the
86
M. Kerbosch, ‘Cinchona Culture in Java: Its History and Development,’ in Pro-
ceedings of the Celebration of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the First Recognized
Use of Cinchona (St. Louis: Missouri Botanical Gardens, 1931), 181–209, at p. 205.
87
Vereeniging ter bevordering van de belangen der kina cultuur, ‘Jaarverslag 1925,’
no. 12, Kerbosch collection, KITLV, Leiden.
88
Vertegenwoordiging der Vereeniging van Kinabast Producenten, no. 1246, 18 Dec.
1935, no. 12, Kerbosch collection, KITLV, Leiden.
89
Van der Schoor, Zuivere en toegepste wetenschap, 45.
90
Directeur van Financien, ‘Begrotingsrekening der gezamenlijke Landsbedrijven
over the jaar 1934,’ no. 8, Kerbosch collection, KITLV, Leiden.
91
‘Verslag der Nederlandsch-Indische Vereeniging tot bevordering van de belangen
der kinacultuur over 1935,’ no. 12, Kerbosch collection, KITLV, Leiden.
92
These regulations, the Kina Uitvoer Ordonnatie, the Kina Uitvoer Verordening
and the Kina Aanplant Ordonnatie went into effect on March 1, 1934.
93
Taylor, ‘Modern Developments,’ 206.
18 Feature Endeavour Vol. 38 No. 1
common good. By putting the fight against malaria at the
forefront of their defense, and suggesting colonial profit
was secondary to safely supplying the world, the Dutch
quinine stake-holders avoided any sanctions. Throughout
the 1930s, the Quinine Bureau offered discounts on qui-
nine to public-health efforts to fight malaria outside the
West. And the Government Cinchona Estate continued to
send seeds of their best Cinchona stock to scientific institu-
tions throughout the tropics. No country or colony seriously
attempted to duplicate the Dutch quinine efforts, which in
itself is evidence for their continued trust in the Dutch
scientific stewardship of quinine.
The epilog to this colonial history is well-known. With
the Japanese defeat of the Netherlands East Indies in
February of 1942, the Allies were cut-off from their supply
of quinine. The Japanese, of course, continued to draw
quinine from the Javanese plantations and the Bandung
factory. This caused drastic actions in the United States,
including new regulations limiting quinine to use in ma-
laria medicines. It also led to hastily organized expeditions
to search for Cinchona in the Andes. And efforts to synthe-
size quinine in the laboratory were redoubled; this was
successfully accomplished in 1944. The US military and
government invested heavily in research into alternative
malaria-drugs. After the end of the war, the Dutch
returned to their Cinchona plantations, and although qui-
nine is still produced in Indonesia, and there is still a
manufacturing factory in Bandung, the world demand
steadily decreased in the postwar period. By the late
1940s, quinine was overshadowed by synthetic anti-malar-
ials, and more generally, the pharmaceutical industry
would be built with chemically synthesized drugs.
As the global pharmaceutical industry came into exis-
tence in the first half of the twentieth century, quinine was
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one of its most important successes: cheap and reliable,
and a very effective therapy against malarial fevers. In this
essay I examine the role of the Dutch planation system in
this industry, and show that Dutch colonial investment in
science and technology allowed the Dutch planters to
dominate the supply of Cinchona bark. In the 1870s and
1880s, the Dutch planters and colonial government collab-
orated to establish a new and viable export crop. After
private Cinchona plantations began supplying abundant
quantities of Cinchona bark in the 1880s, the colonial
government, under the sway of liberal economic policies,
did not further intervene in the market for Cinchona bark,
although it continued to offer scientific counsel to the
planters. But due to persistent low prices for the bark,
which threatened to compromise the privileged position of
the Dutch colony in the quinine industry, the Dutch colo-
nial state returned to a leadership role after 1910. With the
Quinine Agreement of 1913, the Dutch colonial govern-
ment oversaw the creation of a Cinchona bark cartel, which
included Cinchona planters and quinine manufacturers, as
well as the Dutch government. As a result, Dutch imperi-
alism established a framework for global cooperation
amongst the Cinchona suppliers and the quinine manu-
facturers. The global quinine industry, anchored by the
dozen or so dominant quinine manufacturers throughout
the world, purchased almost all of their bark from the
planters in the Dutch colony. A history of the global quinine
industry is beyond the scope of this article; more research
is needed to examine the economic history of the global
manufacturers, quinine marketing and distribution, and
the consumer patterns of quinine use. Any such study
would need to account for the role of the Dutch Cinchona
bark which after 1880 dominated the global Cinchona
market.