Introduction

In the twentieth century dyes, pharmaceuticals, photographic products, explosives, insecticides, fertilizers, synthetic rubber, fuels, and fibers, plastics, and other products have flowed out of the chemical industry and into the consumer economies, war machines, farms, and medical practices of industrial societies. Without the chemical industry the shape of twentieth-century history would not be the same. This has been an international development in which all industrial societies have come to participate. Nevertheless historians have long recognized a special role for the German chemical industry. Between the 1860s, when the first German firms were founded to manufacture the new synthetic dyes, and the outbreak of war in 1914, the fine chemicals industry grew to occupy a significant place in the German economy, established some of the earliest research laboratories in any industry, and came to dominate international markets. In the twentieth century the German chemical industry has played a strategic role in both world wars, has served as exemplar and stimulus to other industries at home and to the chemical industry abroad, and has emerged in the post-World War II period as an important player in the global economy.