This paper seeks to elucidate the role that colonization played in the making of Europe’s modern transnational pharmaceutical industry and in the establishment of the European Community’s single market for pharmaceuticals. Rich anthropologic and (sub-altern) historical studies document how European colonizers condoned and promoted the theft of raw materials and indigenous knowledge, testing experimental therapies on indigenous peoples, and privileging the trade of European pharmaceuticals in colonies – all of which were precursors to European industrialists’ modern pharmaceutical success. On the other hand, mainstream historical and business scholarship describes industrial pharmaceuticals as originating in 19^th century European and American firms that benefitted from industrial policies leading to significant breakthroughs in the inter-war years and a post-war boom in innovation that have made it one of the world’s most profitable industries today. This literature is generally uncritical of the colonial origins of industrial pharmaceutical advances. Meanwhile, between the 1960s-1990s, the European Community introduced regulation and law to progressively integrate, harmonize, and ultimately expand the single European market for pharmaceuticals. The constitutional basis and EU institutional governance of these actions is firmly rooted in the promotion of free movement of goods and the (global) competitiveness of European industry.

This paper’s innovation is in bringing together different, previously unconnected, bodies of knowledge on pharmaceutical policy in European colonies, the ‘mainstream’ history of Europe’s pharmaceutical industry, and EU integration and law advancing a single pharmaceutical market. The first body of knowledge establishes the colonial lens and instrumentalization of industrial pharmaceuticals by colonial powers. The second body of knowledge uses the first to critique the established history of the transnational pharmaceutical industry. The third body of knowledge contextualises EU integration and law for pharmaceutical market-making and for the benefit of Europe’s transnational pharmaceutical companies using insights from the foregoing literature. This paper uses a systematic review of secondary scholarly literature (snowball searched for original/primary sources, where possible), and primary sources in archives of the European Union and selected companies.

By interweaving these histories, I seek reveal the past contributions by, repressions of, and (possibly) support for former European colonies, thereby re-interpreting the origins and effects of the EU’s modern pharmaceutical policy. Accounting for Europe’s colonial past is a critical exercise that should be undertaken now to inform the current revision of the EU’s pharmaceutical legislation (a once-in-20-year reform that defines the operation of Europe’s pharmaceutical sector).

European studies have recently started to engage with postcolonial theory, to the point that Jan Orbie wondered in 2021 whether «a post-colonial turn» was imminent for European Development studies as well. This contribution joins Orbie’s call for the adoption of appropriate frameworks able to produce post-colonial analyses of European development policies, proposing a methodological approach for studying the history of European external relations.

Reconstructing the history of STABEX - the export revenue stabilisation scheme introduced in the first Lomé Convention and presented as a Communitarian response to Global South demands for a New International Economic Order - this paper suggests that this device was instead introduced to serve the neo-colonial objective to maintain a special relationship with former European colonies. This shows how engaging with European integration history from a post-colonial perspective can contribute to a new understating of integration.

This implies the use of different methodological criteria. I argue that Euro-African relations cannot be studied without Global South archives, which show how African countries received European narratives and how they shaped Euro-African relations. Historians engaging with these archives must be mindful of how Western and African concepts might differ. Moreover, European archives must be approached with a critical outlook that allows for the recognition of the strong role that member states played within the Community. Only by recognising that some member states were still empires in the 1950s and that they kept pursuing colonial aims within the Community, can historians write a post-colonial history of European Integration.