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2 Quinine Science The 1848 convulsions in the Netherlands led to far-reaching political changes, which by 1870 would have greater consequences for colonial Indonesia than the 1848 Batavian uprising. Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, liberalism dismantled the ancien régime of the Dutch conservative oligarchy through a series of constitutional changes. This began in March of 1848 when King Willem II ceded considerable power to the liberals in order to forestall a social revolution such as was under way in France and Germany. Under the leadership of J. R. Thorbecke, liberals pushed through a series of political and social reforms, beginning with expanding the electoral rolls, holding elections with secret ballots, and devolving power to provinces and counties. In economic policy it ended protectionist tariffs and laws and hence promoted trade more free from government control. The capstone of the liberal achievement came with the education law of 1879, which created and financed mass primary education in the Netherlands. Three decades after 1848 the Dutch government was a liberal state.1 The ripples of these political changes were not felt in the colony until after 1870, and even then it was only economic liberalism, with its goal of expanding private ownership and investment, that would be implemented. In the 1850s and 1860s the Netherlands East Indies remained distant from the Netherlands, with the governors general still acting as autocrats. The economic system of government-run export-crop agriculture, known as the cultivation system, was still in place. Those coming from the Netherlands saw it romantically as a land of adventure where hard work, a little luck, and good connections might land them a fortune. The government administration had only a rudimentary bureaucracy . For example, in the late 1850s Governor General Pahud retained on his staff the charismatic naturalist Franz Junghuhn, who was to create quinine 33 plantations that reflected Pahud’s glory and power. Pahud would not stand for any kind of criticism of Junghuhn, not from other natural experts in the Indies and not from officials and politicians in the Netherlands. Professionalism, whether in science or administration, had as yet no place in the colony. Nonetheless, after 1848, liberals in the Netherlands took a keen interest in ending economic and political protectionism in the Indies. This was possible due to a new constitution enacted that year, which gave Parliament, for the first time, power over its overseas possessions. The abolishment of the cultivation system and the opening of Java’s economy to Dutch entrepreneurs became an important component of the Liberal Party’s platform during the 1850s.2 In the 1850s real changes were few, though, in part because of caution and worry over destroying the monetary remittances to the Netherlands generated by the cultivation system, the so-called batig slot, and in part because liberals knew very little about how the colony worked. Moreover, holdovers from the conservative 1840s such as Pahud—at that time still minister of colonies—remained important in making colonial policy. Even so, by 1854, liberals had decided that the colonial question would need to be settled by creating an economy of freed labor no longer reliant on coercing and exploiting Javanese peasants. They searched for policies that would lift the heavy work burden off of the Javanese peasant, break the system of forced cultivation, expand Dutch business interests in Java, weaken the old guard’s grip on colonial power, and increase colonial profits, all in a system that was fueled by free Javanese labor.3 How to do this remained unclear. Liberal politicians turned to their scientists for answers, asking them to find ways to administer colonial nature more effectively, similar to what had happened in the British Empire.4 In the mid1850s , in a letter to the minister of colonies, the Utrecht chemist G. J. Mulder urged the government acclimatize a well-selected range of plants: “It is my belief that the goal should be to quickly make Java cultivate everything which can be produced profitably. And only those products that are at a mature stage of development in warm areas and have trade potential, should be considered for transfer to the colony.”5 And it was a Dutch academic scientist, the botanist W. H. de Vriese, to whom the liberals in 1857 assigned the job of ascertaining the state of agriculture in the Indies and to travel to the colony with the charge of answering the question of how to best free the...

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