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.
Recenzijos
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. A major investigation that gave tobacco its rightful place in Cuban history, from the pen of one who is today the premier tobacco historian of the Caribbean. -- Juan José Baldrich A well-timed reprint of a masterful and highly readable historical account -- Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff Marshals a profusion of sources for a profound analysis of a period that was fundamental for the history of this commodity in Cuba. -- Oscar Zanetti Lecuona Obligatory reading for understanding the history of tobacco manufacture and the struggles of the Cuban tobacco workers. -- Joan Casanovas Provides an intersectional understanding of the politics of tobacco. -- Ratna Saptari A gem in the historiography of the Cuban tobacco industry. -- Zoe Nocedo Primo This book continues to be a classic. -- Vicent Sanz Rozalén
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.
