Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937

by Barbara M. Hahn

Overview

How did Bright Flue-Cured Tobacco come to dominate the industry?

In her sweeping history of the American tobacco industry, Barbara Hahn traces the emergence of the tobacco plant’s many varietal types, arguing that they are products not of nature but of economic relations and continued and intense market regulation.

Hahn focuses her study on the most popular of these varieties, Bright Flue-Cured Tobacco. First grown in the inland Piedmont along the Virginia–North Carolina border, Bright Tobacco now grows all over the world, primarily because of its unique—and easily replicated—cultivation and curing methods. Hahn traces the evolution of technologies in a variety of regulatory and cultural environments to reconstruct how Bright Tobacco became, and remains to this day, a leading commodity in the global tobacco industry.

This study asks not what effect tobacco had on the world market, but how that market shaped tobacco into types that served specific purposes and became distinguishable from one another more by technologies of production than genetics. In so doing, it explores the intersection of crossbreeding, tobacco-raising technology, changing popular demand, attempts at regulation, and sheer marketing ingenuity during the heyday of the American tobacco industry.

Combining economic theory with the history of technology, Making Tobacco Bright revises several narratives in American history, from colonial staple-crop agriculture to the origins of the tobacco industry to the rise of identity politics in the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421402864
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2011
Series:	Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Barbara Hahn is an associate professor of history at Texas Tech University and the associate editor of Technology and Culture. She is the coauthor of The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans and Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue
Part I
1. Making Tobacco Virginian
2. Growing the Business
3. Death and Taxes
Part II
4. Ripeness Is All
5. Inventing Tradition
6. Stabilization
Appendix
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

Editorial Reviews

A discerning analysis of not only how a commodity—tobacco—was shaped and defined by technology, but also how technology can be influenced by a commodity . . . This interesting, thorough history will appeal to readers and researchers alike. Highly recommended.
—Choice

Thoroughly researched, engaging, and enjoyable . . . An excellent first book.
—Environmental History

Strongly argued and deeply researched.
—Agricultural History

Hahn has produced an important book, thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, that deserves a wide audience among American historians.
—Journal of American History

Hahn has written an ambitious book that examines how Americans created a commodity whose roots were densely—perhaps inextricably—tangled with those of the growing nation. Her work deserves a broad readership among students of southern agriculture, economic history, and the history of science and technology.
—Journal of Southern History

An impressive book, one that rewrites conventional understandings of tobacco as a crop, a commodity, and a symbol. From Jamestown to contemporary southern fields, Hahn tells an old story in an entirely fresh way.
—Technology and Culture

From the Publisher

Thoroughly researched, engaging, and enjoyable . . . An excellent first book.

Environmental History

Strongly argued and deeply researched.

Agricultural History

A discerning analysis of not only how a commodity—tobacco—was shaped and defined by technology, but also how technology can be influenced by a commodity . . . This interesting, thorough history will appeal to readers and researchers alike. Highly recommended.

Choice

Hahn has produced an important book, thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, that deserves a wide audience among American historians.

Journal of American History

"... Making Tobacco Bright is an impressive book, one that rewrites conventional understandings of tobacco as a crop, a commodity, and a symbol. From Jamestown to contemporary southern fields, Hahn tells an old story in an entirely fresh way."

Technology and Culture - Drew A. Swanson

"Hahn has written an ambitious book that examines how Americans created a commodity whose roots were densely—perhaps inextricably—tangled with those of the growing nation. Her work deserves a broad readership among students of southern agriculture, economic history, and the history of science and technology."

Journal of Southern History - Max Grivno

"Strongly argued and deeply researched."

Agricultural History - Evan P. Bennett

"Thoroughly researched, engaging, and enjoyable...An excellent first book."

Environmental History - James C. Giesen

Hahn has written an ambitious book that examines how Americans created a commodity whose roots were densely—perhaps inextricably—tangled with those of the growing nation. Her work deserves a broad readership among students of southern agriculture, economic history, and the history of science and technology.

Journal of Southern History

An impressive book, one that rewrites conventional understandings of tobacco as a crop, a commodity, and a symbol. From Jamestown to contemporary southern fields, Hahn tells an old story in an entirely fresh way.

Technology and Culture