Abstract
Tobacco varieties emerge as a result of technological manipulation (during seed production, cultivation, curing and manufacturing processes), socio-cultural preferences, political change as well as changing market demand and supply.1 This is how flue-cured yellowish tobacco foliage in the US was exported throughout the world from its original location and became famous as ‘Flue-cured Virginia’ (FCV),2 or simply as ‘cigarette tobacco’.3 Not only was FCV in huge demand throughout the 20th century,4 numerous countries also successfully replicated it in their own soils,5 making it a ‘cigarette century’.6
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Notes
Cf. B. Hahn (2011) Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617–1937 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 12.
M. Meinking (2009) Cash Crop to Cash Cow: The History of Tobacco and Smoking in America (Broomall, PA: Mason Crest), pp. 61–75.
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W. A. Brennan (1915) Tobacco Leaves: Being a Book of Facts for Smokers (Menasha, WI: George Banta Publishing Company), pp. 29–39.
Cf. H. Hobhouse (2004) Seeds of Wealth: Four Plants that Made Men Rich (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard), p. 225.
In 1877 the Tirhut region in North Bihar comprised the districts of Champaran, Darbhanga and Muzaffarpur (which became Samastipur later on): W. W. Hunter (1877) A Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. XIII (compiled by A. W. Mackie): Tirhut and Champaran (London: Trübner & Company), p. v.
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Around 1900 the importance of fermentation for tobacco’s aroma had been discovered and as a result more emphasis was being paid to curing practices: N. G. Clarke (1899) ‘The flavour of tobacco’ Contemporary Review, 75 (January-June), 880–5.
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Sinha-Kerkhoff, K. (2016). Yellow Tobacco, Black Tobacco: Indigenous (desi) Tobacco as an Anti-Commodity. In: Hazareesingh, S., Maat, H. (eds) Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381101_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381101_3
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