Knowledge and Politics: The León y Castillo Brothers and the ‘Cuban Model’ of Tobacco in the Canary Islands, 1852–1914

Abstract

After the Free Ports Declaration of 1852 and the crisis in cochineal in Spain’s Canary Islands, entrepreneurs, merchants and politicians set out to acquire and apply Cuban agricultural and industrial knowledge to promote the ‘Cuban model’ of tobacco and sugar. In charting their endeavours, the focus of this chapter is on tobacco and the León y Castillo brothers, who were directly involved in production, the design and construction of major infrastructure, and political decision-making. In the context of the declining Spanish empire, it proposes a revision of historiography in that, while Canaries tobacco floundered in the late nineteenth century, the foundations were laid for tobacco to acquire twentieth-century regional specialism as a Canary Islands local and export product.