Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on November 12, 2007
Enterprise and Society 2007 8(4):790-798; doi:10.1093/es/khm080
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Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference.
Making Tobacco Bright: Institutions, Information, and Industrialization in the Creation of an Agricultural Commodity, 1617–1937
BARBARA HAHN completed her dissertation in 2006 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University. Contact information: TTU-History Department, Box 41013, Lubbock, Texas, 79409-1013, USA
E-mail: barbara.hahn@ttu.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Colonial America produced two main tobacco types: Orinoco and Sweet-Scented. Today, tobacco has more exact varieties: the Connecticut Shade-Grown Cuban-Seed Cigar Leaf, the Bright Flue-Cured Cigarette Tobacco of North Carolina and southside Virginia. In the 1930s, these tobacco types came under law when New Deal measures based production controls around varietal designations. In the same decade, however, plant breeders learned that bright tobacco was genetically indistinguishable from both colonial Orinoco and from most other, darker kinds of tobacco produced in the United States. "Making Tobacco Bright" (MTB) therefore explores the emergence of the tobacco types. More precisely, this project examines the long-term historical developments by which the bright tobacco that fed the cigarette revolution of the late nineteenth century became a recognizable category and a distinct variety, produced and defined by strict harvest and curing methods, grown for particular market purposes. By studying the social construction of tobacco types, the