Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617â "1937 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)

Hahn, Barbara M.

ISBN 10: 1421402866 / ISBN 13: 9781421402864

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011

About this Item

Very Good. Lightly used, may have light reading wear and/or publisher's or previous owner's markings, and one light pencil mark on page 110, easily eraseable. Pasadena's finest new and used bookstore since 1992.

Seller Inventory # mon0000653291

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617â "1937 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1421402866
• ISBN 13: 9781421402864
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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.