Overview

This is the story of Cuban tobacco, whose agricultural and industrial development was fashioned as deftly as a Havana cigar around overseas trading interests. It traces the nineteenth-century growth of a strong tobacco oligarchy, peasant grower class and urban salaried work force, alongside slave and indentured labour, and examines how a prestigious manufacturing country was transformed into an exporter of leaf. Visibly poor peasant agriculture concealed foreign and home capital which, while creating some large plantations, used and even propagated a most extreme form of sharecropping. Well into the twentieth century, an increasingly embattled industry catered to dwindling luxury markets and an unstable, fluctuating home market with but a few relatively large, on the whole family, concerns and a proliferation of small sweatshop and outwork production.

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9781914278051

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Reviews

"""A most welcome contribution to the scholarship on Cuba, going a long way toward closing one of the more conspicuous gaps in the literature, and providing a model of careful research and judicious scholarship. The book will serve as a standard reference work on the subject for years to come."" Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Author of 'Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution' ""This excellent book, from the pen of the premier tobacco historian of the Caribbean, documents thoroughly the changing character of the labor process, gender relations, trade unions, and the concentration of landed and industrial ownership within the trade."" Juan José Baldrich, Author of 'Smoker Beyond the Sea: The Story of Puerto Rican Tobacco' ""'Tobacco on the Periphery' marshals a profusion of sources for a profound analysis of a period that was fundamental for the history of this commodity in Cuba: that of the regularization of the cultivation of the leaf, the development of its manufacture and the financing of the prestige and the commercial value of the Havana cigar on the world stage. It does so without losing sight of the transcendental social side, since the cigar factories were the cradle of the Cuban working class and its trade unionism."" Oscar Zanetti, Co-author of Sugar and Railroads: A Cuban History, 1837-1959' ""A well-timed reprint of a masterful and highly readable historical account, surpassing all published academic histories on tobacco in Cuba. In her humorous and sometimes caustic style, Jean Stubbs shows that tobacco, particularly the Havana cigar, was and is of great socio-economic, cultural and political consequence within and outside Cuba."" Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff, Author of 'Colonising Plants of Bihar (1760-1950). Tobacco betwixt Indigo and Sugarcane' ""This book continues to be a classic - a point of reference and a stimulus for continuing to delve deeper into these themes. Her main arguments take us beyond Cuba, establishing a transnational perspective in contemporary tobacco studies."" Vicent Sanz Rozalén, Co-editor of 'Grandes vicios, grandes ingresos. El monopolio del tabaco en los imperios ibéricos, siglos XVII-XX' ""Provides readers with an intersectional understanding of the politics of tobacco peasantries and proletarians and the different forms of unionism through the years in dealing with the changing role of the state and capital within global market transformations. Combining history and deep ethnography, this book offers an insightful guideline for researchers who study commodities in other parts of the world."" Ratna Saptari, Co-editor of 'Labour in Southeast Asia: Local Processes in a Globalised World' ""Offers a Thompsonian perspective, in which the material production of tobacco leaf, and its manufacture in the urban centres, including the working conditions and working-class struggles, are the basis for the argument, reaching into the post-1959 period. The book is rigorous and current. Obligatory reading for understanding the history of tobacco manufacture and the struggles of the Cuban tobacco workers."" Joan Casanovas, Author of 'Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850-1898' ""This book is a gem in the historiography on the Cuban tobacco industry, indicative of our national identity, for its well-documented and profound analysis of the information that it brings together."" Zoe Nocedo Primo, Former Director, Museo del Tabaco, Havana, Cuba, 1999-2018"

Author Information

Jean Stubbs has published widely on Cuba, with a specialist interest in tobacco, class, race, gender, nation and migration. In 1985 she established her place as a pre-eminent historian of Cuban tobacco with the publication of Tobacco on the Periphery (a new expanded edition of which was published by Amaurea Press in 2023). Her foundational work on Cuban tobacco, and especially the Havana cigar, led her to trace cultivation, trade, manufacture, labour and consumption on a regional and global scale, linking commodity and migration histories, drawing on sociological, anthropological and agronomic approaches, as well as archival and oral history. Now for the first time, her extensive writings have been collected into a single volume, containing 19 of her tobacco-related articles published between 1982 and 2024. Jean Stubbs first went to Cuba in 1968 to conduct research for her PhD (University of London, 1975). She married there, had two children, and lived and worked in Havana until 1987. After returning to London, she served as chair of both the UK Society for Caribbean Studies and the regional Caribbean Studies Association. In 2009, she was awarded the UNESCO Toussaint Louverture Medal for combatting racism in political, literary and artistic fields, and in 2012 was elected a member of the Cuban Academy of History. In addition to her work on tobacco, her research into contemporary Cuban migration built on this to explore how commodities and nation-branding have shaped new Cuban diasporic mobilities; and her involvement in the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project led to her interest in commodity frontiers and environmental history, and co-producing the documentary Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes (2019). She also recently co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Commodity History and the forthcoming Palgrave volume Tobacco in Global Perspective.

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