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• W2086177029 abstract "Reviewed by: Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937 by Barbara Hahn Drew A. Swanson (bio) Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937. By Barbara Hahn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. x+236. $60. Few topics have drawn more interest from historians than America's long obsession with tobacco. It is thus a pleasant surprise that Barbara Hahn's Making Tobacco Bright has something quite original to say. She argues that tobacco's myriad forms, from bright leaf to burley, long taken for granted as distinct varieties, owe their being largely to the demands and limits of institutions and so are the result of technological systems more than expressions of nature. This process of making tobacco types was crucial to the history of the crop's cultivation, manufacturing, and consumption. The book is full of observations that enrich or challenge conventional histories of tobacco. For example, colonial legislation governing export tobacco shaped what forms of the plant could be considered realVirginia tobacco: suckers, flowers, and ratoons—all legitimate products in various parts of the world—had no place within the export system. Hahn also highlights the ways in which emancipation and the annual labor-contracting system that followed compressed the crop cycle within the bounds of the calendar year, altering cultivation and curing patterns along the way. Federal taxation after the Civil War was equally transformative, creating an artificial distinction between agriculture and manufacturing in a crop that had always blurred the lines between the two. Also fascinating is Hahn's evidence for the persistence of varying cultivation and curing methods within each tobacco type well into the twentieth century, long after historians generally consider tobacco varieties to have been well-defined crops. Making Tobacco Bright even furnishes an intriguing revision of Kentucky's Black Patch War, casting aside the conventional explanation of the violence as an outgrowth of a traditional, established agriculture facing change brought on by industrial modernity in the form of predatory monopsonies. Instead, Hahn argues that Kentucky's tobacco growers were themselves struggling to organize in order to better define their own products and thus their power as producers, creating identifiable types and cultivation methods at the same time that they threatened to scrape plant beds and burn warehouses. Finally, the book explores the codification of institutional patterns by the New Deal commodity programs, which, before they could manage crops, first had to define them. These and many more observations are combined into a powerful argument for the importance of institutional and technological feedback in the creation of commodity networks that in the end seem only natural. Hahn's emphasis that technological systems, shaped by various institutions, only made tobacco types seem natural is so [End Page 402] emphatic as to give pause. She declares in conclusion that Technology is an element of economic structure. It sets the limits of the possible (p. 182). Might we not with equal satisfaction replace technology in the above with environment, and be equally accurate—or equally troubled? Nature inMaking Tobacco Bright often appears as little more than a passive medium, a stage for farmers, businessmen, and government officials to act upon, a stage that never provides resistance or limitation. Hahn admits to finding environmental history unappealing, yet there are environments in play throughout her narrative—material soils, plants, and climates that not only contributed to (rather than determined) the forms tobacco took, but which also underwent radical change as a result of the human pursuit of those forms (p. 226). Indeed, the old tobacco belt of Virginia and North Carolina was among the most eroded of all southern landscapes by the New Deal era, a particular problem area in a region replete with troubles, and this gullied land posed very real challenges for its tobacco-raising inhabitants. It seems as if this reciprocal relationship between human agency and material environments should be an integral part of Hahn's story. These concerns aside,Making Tobacco Bright is an impressive book, one that rewrites conventional understandings of tobacco as a crop, a commodity, and a symbol. From Jamestown to contemporary southern fields, Hahn tells an old story in an entirely fresh way. As..." @default.
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• W2086177029 title "<i>Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937</i> by Barbara Hahn (review)" @default.
• W2086177029 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2013.0060" @default.
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