Dutch Indies

But "imports and exports" were merely business then. When Germany began to replace her imports of petroleum, we acclaimed again the miracle of industrial substitutes. The world naphtha supply would last only twenty to thirty years. Germany could not get enough naphtha from the United States, Russia, Venezuela, Persia, the Dutch Indies, and Rumania. With Farben s new hydrogenation process, Germany could make all the naphtha she wanted. 

The story of the chemical activity at Royal Dutch begins in 1905, when Henry Deterding, the general manager of the Asiatic Petroleum Company - the sales cartel of the oil producers in the Dutch Indies, which included the British Shell... 

Abraham StreifFwas bom in the former Dutch Indies, todays Indonesia. He graduated in 1901 from the Technological Institute, Delft NL, taking then postgraduate studies at the Swiss Federal Institute, ETH Zurich, serving as hydraulic engineering assistant. 

GauUheria punctata, a plant growing in British India, and also in the Dutch Indies, yields, according to De Vrij, from 0 75 to 1 15 per cent, of essential oil. The oil has the following characters —... 

Canarium euptoron is the principal species yielding Lagam balsam in the Dutch Indies. The oil has a specific gravity 0 905 to 0 912, optical rotation about - 8, and refractive index 1 4972. It consists chiefly of caryophyllene, with a little caryophyllene alcohol. Saniples distilled from a balsam of the same name, but obviously of different origin, had specific gravities of 0 882 to 0 883 at 26. ... 

In 1942 the Japanese overran Malaya and the then Dutch East Indies to cut off the main sources of natural rubber for the United States and the British Commonwealth. Because of this the US Government initiated a crash programme for the installation of plants for the manufacture of a rubber from butadiene and styrene. This product, then known as GR-S (Government Rubber-Styrene), provided at that time an inferior substitute for natural rubber but, with a renewed availability of natural rubber at the end of the war, the demand for GR-S slumped considerably. (Today the demand for SBR (as GR-S is now known) has increased with the great improvements in quality that have been made and SBR is today the principal synthetic rubber). 

The oldest effective drug for the treatment of this disease is indisputably quinine. Although the antipyretic activity of cinchona bark was known to the Incas, it remained for the Jesuit missionaries to uncover its antimalarial properties in the early seventeenth century. The advance of organic chemistry led to the isolation and identification of the alkaloid, quinine, as the active compound at the turn of this century. The emerging clinical importance of this drug led up to the establishment of cinchona plantations in the Dutch East Indies. This very circum-... 

Lai, S. D. and B. K. Yadav. Folk medicine of Kurukshetra district (Haryana), India. EconBot 1983 37(3) 299-305. Hirschhom, H. H. Botanical remedies of the former Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). I. Eumycetes, Pteridophyta, Gymnospermae, Angiospermae (Monocotyledons only). J Ethnopharmacol 1983 7(2) 123-156. 

Tincal (Borax). Even in the eighteenth century, borax was believed to be an artificial production (59, 60). Caspar Neumann (1683-1737) said that Borax is a saline substance, of which neither the origin nor the component parts are as yet known. It comes from the East-Indies in little crystalline masses.. . . The refining of Borax was formerly practised only at Venice, and hence the refined Borax was called Venetian but the Dutch are now the only masters of this manufacture. Serapio calls the rough Borax as it comes from the Indies Tincar and the dealers in this commodity still distinguish it by the name Tincar or Tincal, never calling it Borax till it is refined (95). 

P.-J. Macquer (1718—1784) said that Though Borax is of great use in many chymical operations, especially in the fusion of metals,. . . yet till of late years Chymists were quite ignorant of its nature, as they still are of its origin concerning which we know nothing with certainty, but that it comes rough from the East Indies and is purified by the Dutch (96). 

Boric acid was first prepared in 1702 by Willem Homberg. He was bom on January 8, 1652, at Batavia on the island of Java. When his father left the service of the Dutch East India Company, the family settled in Amsterdam, where young Wilhelm (or Willem) had a much better opportunity to study than in the torrid climate of the East Indies. After studying law at Jena and Leipzig, he was admitted to the bar in Magdeburg in 1674. Soon becoming more interested in the laws of nature than in those devised by man, he began to devote much time to botany, astronomy, and mechanics. 

Wilhelm Homberg (1652-1713), though born in Batavia of German ancestry in what was then the Dutch East Indies, spent his adult career in... 

Our fatherland, Acheh, Sumatra, had always been a free and sovereign state since the world begun... However, when, after World War II, the Dutch East Indies was supposed to have been liquidated. .. our fatherland, Acheh, was not returned to us. Instead, our fatherland was turned over by the Dutch to the Javanese—their ex-mercenaries—by hasty fiat of colonial powers. The Javanese are alien and foreign people to us Achehnese Sumatrans. .. Indonesia was a fraud a cloak to cover up Javanese colonialism. (Tiro 1981 15-17)... 

Henley, David 1996. Nationalism and Regionalism in a Colonial Context Minahasa in the Dutch East Indies. Leiden KITLV Press. 

Nagtegal, Luc 1996. Riding the Dutch Tiger the Dutch East Indies Company and the Northeast Coast of Java, 1680-1743. Leiden KITLV. 

---