The Golden Leaf

In 1940, Fernando Ortiz famously described Cuban history as a counterpoint between two very different agricultural commodities: sugar and tobacco. Given that through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century Cuba's national identity, and relationship to the world, became very closely related with the former, this reminder that there was much more to the island than cane was of great importance. As Charlotte Cosner's study of Cuban tobacco shows, up until the early nineteenth century the “golden leaf” of tobacco played a rather more significant role in Cuba's history and its relationship to the world than did the soon-to-be ubiquitous “white gold” of sugar that has tended to dominate the historiography.However, Cosner diverges significantly from the post-Ortiz orthodoxy, in which tobacco is seen as indigenous, local, and founded on peasant smallholding, in contrast to the alien, export-oriented, plantation-based sugarcane. Drawing on a wide range of mainly eighteenth-century archival sources, she convincingly shows that tobacco was in fact fundamental to the Spanish colonial project. Indeed, revenue from Cuban tobacco accounted for a quarter of the Spanish state's income. While it may have originated on the island—and conditions there appeared to be particularly suited to the growing of a higher-quality leaf than could be obtained elsewhere—and played an important part in local culture, it was clearly at the same time an export commodity par excellence. Cosner also provides much material to illustrate how tobacco cultivation, processing, and trade encompassed a very wide cross section of the Cuban population, at every level. At least in the eighteenth century, tobacco was a key defining factor in social, political, and economic relations on the island.But while at the same time painting an intricate national picture, Cosner does an admirable job of setting this in the broader context not just of the Spanish empire (so dependent upon Cuban leaf) but of the Atlantic world as a whole. She juxtaposes Cuban tobacco cultivation and trade with that of other parts of the Americas—notably Virginia, but also elsewhere in Hispanic America (such as Brazil and Peru) where tobacco came to be produced as an export crop. As a result, this very Cuban story is shown to play a central part both in the hemisphere's political and military conflicts and in the rise of transnational commodity-based capitalism.It is unfortunate that the author has chosen to present this volume as though it encompasses four centuries of Cuban colonial and postcolonial history. In actual fact, the body of the book is very much focused on the eighteenth century—and more particularly on the period in which Spain enforced monopolistic control over Cuba's tobacco (factoría). While Cosner provides some insight into the earlier emergence of tobacco as an important export crop, she really gives no more than lip service to how the story that she paints developed through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. While the study provides a detailed description of Cuba's tobacco complex during the eighteenth-century heyday of the factoría, even suggesting that this played a key part in ensuring that the island remained loyal to Spain when elsewhere the American colonies were claiming their independence, there is no sustained analysis of why this apparently successful arrangement was brought to an end in 1817 (nor why this failed to precipitate Cuba's exit from the Spanish empire). One reason why Cosner is perhaps unable to do so is that she gives no real consideration to the interrelationship between tobacco and the island's other agricultural commodities—most notably sugar, though also coffee—that competed both for land resources and the island's scanty labor force.These limitations notwithstanding, The Golden Leaf is a good addition both to the historiography of Cuban tobacco and to the island's history, along with its imperial and transnational interconnections, in the eighteenth century. Charlotte Cosner succeeds in bringing us an engaging story that ranges from the detail of individual local human lives and relations, through the complexity of national society and its institutions, to the global stage of empire and commodity trade

Ancient history · Archaeology · Atlantic World · Biology · Colonialism · Economic history · Geography · Historiography · Indigenous · State (computer science) · Cuban History and Society · History