Plantation Kingdom by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

BARBARA HAHN

Tobacco’s Commodity Route

THERE IS A MYSTERY about tobacco that can be answered only historically: What are the varietal types, and how did they develop? In the American colonies, around the Chesapeake Bay, most of the British settlers grew what Lewis Cecil Gray (the dean of Southern antebellum agricultural history) called the “two great colonial types,” Orinoco and Sweet Scented. Today, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), founded during the Civil War, has identified finer distinctions. The USDA formally named the tobacco types in 1925, and each is defined along three axes: where it is from, what it is for, and what has been done to produce it. Examples include Connecticut Shade-Grown Cuban-Seed Cigar Leaf, Eastern Dark Fire-Cured Tobacco of Kentucky and Tennessee, Western Dark Fire-Cured Tobacco of Kentucky and Tennessee, and Bright Flue-Cured Cigarette Tobacco of North Carolina and Southside Virginia. How were these types distinguished from one another? Specific institutions, including both government regulations and trade relationships, created incentive structures for unique cultivation methods in particular regions that produced leaf with characteristics that served specific markets. This historical process constructed and codified the varietal types. Plant types usually assumed to be naturally distinct were in fact products made by human choice, market needs, and the regulatory culture of the tobacco industry.1

Unlike the commodity hell into which the other crops in this book ultimately descended—in which price competition among undifferentiated goods plunged planters into perdition—tobacco’s commodification is a more complex story. At first, tobacco planters in the American South benefited, as did rice and sugar producers, from the mercantilist laws of the empire. After independence, however, its postharvest processing grew into a fully realized industry that manufactured tobacco-based consumer goods for global markets. At the same time, merchants found new markets, and growers specialized production methods to meet them. Once that task was complete—once each tobacco type described an interchangeable commodity—the process familiar from the chapters on rice and sugar could begin in earnest. As this chapter demonstrates, tobacco’s eventual descent into commodity hell resulted in violent resistance in the twentieth century. A few decades later, the renewal of government protections against price-cutting competition defined tobacco types that paradoxically supported commodification. Tobacco varieties do economic work, in other words. While the causes of varietal differentiation are historical and therefore complex, their effects are clear and parsimonious (the principle that the fewest possible assumptions should be made when formulating an explanation), as economists prefer.

Tobacco types developed historically—rather than biologically—because there is in fact very little genetic difference among them. These lessons were not immediately appreciated. By 1936, however, government geneticists had determined that bright and dark tobaccos from Virginia were “so similar as to be almost indistinguishable,” although their visible, sensible, morphological characteristics were distinct. They recognized that when the cultivation of bright cigarette tobacco had begun to replace dark colonial tobacco after the Civil War, “[t]here was no significant change in the varieties of seed used,” and “the present strains of the Orinoco as a whole do not differ greatly from those employed originally.

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