In Making Tobacco Bright, Barbara Hahn has produced an important addition to the histories of agriculture and technology. It is a major undertaking to analyze the causes and consequences of the changes that occurred in the tobacco industry over a 320-year period; it is even more impressive to link these changes to evolving political, economic, and social conditions. This is precisely what Hahn has achieved. Her overarching thesis is that agricultural technologies are constructed by humans rather than the products of nature. She uses the history of tobacco to illustrate this general premise. The extent to which tobacco culture, manufacturing, and distribution changed, and then changed again, in response to evolving tastes (sometimes themselves the product of industry campaigns), laws, wars, and economic conditions is truly remarkable.

Tobacco was British North America's first commercial crop. It largely defined the economy of Colonial Virginia and would become important in many other states. For roughly 75 percent of the slave era in the American South, more slaves were assigned to tobacco farming and processing than to cotton production. Yet, economic historians have devoted far more attention to cotton production than to tobacco culture. Hahn helps redress this imbalance.Footnote ¹

Hahn's contribution would have been even more impressive if she had offered more explicit comparisons of the experiences of the tobacco economy with those of the Cotton South. To start with, both sectors experienced significant changes in biological innovations. In cotton, this had an enormous effect on labor productivity in the antebellum period. There does not appear to have been comparable increases in labor productivity in tobacco farming or processing. This widening labor productivity gap had significant ramifications for the transfer of slaves out of tobacco states into cotton production.Footnote ² In a similar vein, tobacco does not seem to have had large economies-of-scale as many have attributed (perhaps unwarrantedly so) to cotton production. Furthermore, from reading Hahn it does not appear that tobacco suffered a large loss in efficiency following the Civil War. It has been widely argued the end of slavery resulted in a significant decline in hours worked by blacks in the cotton sector. Did this happen in the tobacco sector? If not, why?

Hahn highlights the role that government policy had on the tobacco industry since the colonial era. British policy guaranteed a market. The Virginia House of Burgesses passed legislation complete with an inspection system to control quantity and quality of the colony's exports—no suckers, no small quantity or loose leaf sales, no low-quality lower leaves allowed. According to Hahn, this legislation increased the peak-load labor demand, which in turn spurred the movement from a small holder free labor system to a world of slave labor on larger plantations. The Civil War and the end of slavery reversed the process and led to smaller-scale operations. The war itself also led to the demise of Richmond as the principal manufacturing and distribution center. Post-Civil War tax policies resulted in a greater separation in agriculture and manufacturing. New Deal quotas ingrained farm size and technologies during a period when other sectors of the agricultural economy were rapidly changing. At the same time, government supported research increased the industry's ability to adopt new methods (including fertilizer) and respond to diseases and pests. Hahn's analysis of the unintended consequences of government policies is first rate.

I am less enthralled with Hahn's treatment of the tobacco plant and of plant genetics. Hahn is correct that varieties grown in different regions and crafted for different markets are surprisingly uniform genetically. She goes on to argue that the great bulk of the differences in the final product were due the local environments, cultural decisions, the idiosyncratic whims of the graders, and marketing and manufacturing practices. Plant variety played little or no role in her story. Hahn only cites one recent scientific journal article (on China) in support of her contention that genetics mattered little. The broader journal literature confirms the genetic similarity of many tobacco varieties; but, by my reading, it does not conclude that variety was unimportant in producing different characteristics. Small genetic differences can be commercially important just as they can play a key role in disease resistance or in determining drought tolerance. Yes, tobacco is a relatively plastic plant, meaning that a single genotype may yield different phenotypes when grown under different conditions. But mutants with different DNA sequencing did occur, and when selected and cultivated these yielded different characteristics. The many cultural and environmental influences that Hahn emphasized were important in determining characteristics, but so were plant genetics.