This corporate history of BASF offers a view of the functioning of an industrial organization that has managed to thrive and expand since 1865. Moreover, it reveals much about the reasons for the extraordinary economic dynamics of the German empire and the enormous expansion of the world economy before World War I. It permits the probing of the origins and spread of the knowledge society, in which science and research-based innovation have become the key determinants of economic growth and social development. Accordingly, BASF's history developed at the core of Germany's wartime economy...

It has been said that history is a debate between the present and the past about the future. Nowhere are these lines drawn more significantly than in the study of science and war. And nowhere is the discourse more relevant, than in the study of science and technology as foundations and multipliers of military power. This book is concerned with one particularly seminal aspect of this development -- the history of chemical munitions during and immediately after the First World War. The Great War, as it came to be known, was not the first industrial war, but it was the first to involve all the...

This corporate history of BASF offers a view of the functioning of an industrial organization that has managed to thrive and expand since 1865. Moreover, it reveals much about the reasons for the extraordinary economic dynamics of the German empire and the enormous expansion of the world economy before World War I. It permits the probing of the origins and spread of the knowledge society, in which science and research-based innovation have become the key determinants of economic growth and social development. Accordingly, BASF's history developed at the core of Germany's wartime economy...

In the early twentieth century, an elite group of modern-minded scientists in Germany, led by the eminent organic chemist Emil Fischer, set out to create new centers and open new sources of funding for chemical research. Their efforts led to the establishment in 1911 of the chemical institues of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of the Sciences, whose original staff included several future Nobel laureates. Although these institutes were designed to promote "free research" that would uphold German Leadership in international science, they also came to promote the integration of...