Making tobacco bright: Institutions, information, and industrialization in the creation of an agricultural commodity, 1617--1937.
详细信息
文摘
This study explores the interactions between the tobacco industry and tobacco agriculture over several centuries, and within a series of distinct institutional frameworks. It argues that modern-day U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) tobacco types---distinguished less by genetics than by growing environment, technologies of production, and market purposes---function as a form of market regulation disguised as botanic taxonomy. Over the years, what farmers did to produce the leaf and what manufacturers and consumers expected of it shaped one another, creating recognizable characteristics on which to base economic decisions, characteristics for growers to achieve and buyers to expect. The information contained within type-designations, and the methods used to achieve the qualities associated with particular varieties, eventually formed the basis of government grading, price regulation, and New Deal support for agricultural production.;In the colonial period, Virginia's inspection laws established cultivation practices that created a recognizable product. By preventing the export of some tobacco, these laws also helped establish a home industry. Manufacturers in turn required flexible, modular, responsive raw material production. Centered in Virginia, producing brand-name consumer products for national distribution well before 1840, and hidden deep within the commercial structures that served plantation production, the antebellum tobacco industry provides a new model of industrialization, an example entirely compatible with slave labor.;After the Civil War, three institutional shifts transformed the industry and solidified the borders between raw material production and industrial manufacturing. Taxation distinguished manufactured products from agricultural processes. Emancipation, especially the need to fit production into annual contracts among laborers, landlords, and suppliers of credit, changed cultivation and sales practices. The USDA attempted to help farmers meet their markets and therefore regulated the relationship between the sectors, defining types based on what was done to make them, where they were grown, and what they were for: Connecticut Shade-Grown Cuban-Seed Cigar Leaf, North Carolina Bright Flue-Cured Cigarette Tobacco. The dissertation begins in 1617, with the first leaf exported from colonial Virginia, and ends with the USDA's 1937 recognition that most tobacco types were genetically indistinguishable---from one another, and from the exports of 1617.