Rethinking tobacco history: Commodities, empire and agency in global perspective, 1780–1960

Tobacco was one of the most important globally traded commodities from the 17th century through to the present day, and yet it has received relatively little attention in the historiography of modern empires in comparison to other commodities, such as sugar or cotton. As a result, recent approaches to rewriting the history of European imperialism from a more global perspective have hardly been problematized with regard to the peculiarities of tobacco history. Nowadays, studies no longer understand empire as a rigid relationship between metropole and colonies, but take the dynamics of actors within an empire as seriously as the networks and global processes that crossed imperial borders, or indeed lay beyond them. The conference starts from this assumption