Charlotte A. Cosner. The Golden Leaf

Throughout most of the colonial era in Cuba, tobacco was a sui generis product in the sense that it held a draconian royal monopoly until the second decade of the nineteenth century. As a result, the history of its production and commerce differs significantly from that of other important crops such as coffee or sugar. In The Golden Leaf: How Tobacco Shaped Cuba and the Atlantic World, Charlotte A. Cosner has taken on the daunting task of examining this history, bringing to life a series of issues that have rarely been discussed in-depth before. To be sure, the history of tobacco in Cuba is still barely out of its cradle. The Golden Leaf rectifies, in part, this absence of studies by offering a thorough investigation of this plant’s history; one that is not limited to Cuba, or even to the Spanish Empire, but covers the entire Atlantic world. Beyond the work of scholars like Jean Stubbs and Vicent Sanz, little new has been published on Cuban tobacco in the past thirty years. Cosner’s book, then, is a welcome addition to the study of Cuba’s so-called “secondary” products such as coffee, indigo, and wax, which have often been eclipsed by the overwhelming scholarship on the sugar plantations. Here, a large number of local and international conflicts, such as the revolts of the vegueros (tobacco planters) during the early eighteenth century and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), are brought to the forefront of the analysis.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Atlantic World · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Political science · Scholarship · World history · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies