Commodities Shaping a New Imperial History: Tobacco and the Iberian Empires

Abstract

Tobacco, which originated in the Americas, was one of the early commodities to shape a new imperial history. This chapter highlights recent historiography of tobacco in the Iberian Empires, which from the seventeenth century became embedded in transimperial and transcolonial connections in territories of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. This longue-durée history was one of tobacco monopoly and an Atlantic tobacco system that was integrally tied to the slave trade from Africa to the Americas, extended across the Pacific; was constantly dogged by opposition, illicit trade and smuggling; and witnessed major changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is illustrated by two case studies, one of Portugese and the other of Spanish tobacco history, and a concluding section signals comparative lessons of this history and the relevance of the Iberian case for the broader study of commodities and empire.