Global Tobacco History Network Members

Acioli, Gustavo: “I work on connections between Brazil’s tobacco production and the West African slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

Adney, Kaleb Herman: Kaleb Herman Adney is a historian of economic life in the late Ottoman Empire and its successor states Turkey, Greece, and Egypt. His research deals with the political economy of tobacco in the Eastern Mediterranean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the commercial networks and credit markets that allowed specific social groups to dominate this important regional industry. His dissertation analyzes the economic transactions and commercial practices that became common amongst tobacco merchants in the region during this time given the precarity of global financial markets and the political turbulence which wracked the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans after imperial collapse there. In recounting a cultural history of finance, smuggling, and labor, he demonstrates that Ottoman state-building and the expansion of European finance were deeply interconnected and interdependent processes. Together, they shaped a culture of violence, nationalist action, and ethnic cleansing in the Ottoman Balkans that reached its pinnacle in the Greek-Bulgarian and Greek-Turkish population exchanges of 1919 and 1923-24, respectively. Adney’s broader research interests include Islamic legal inheritance in the Balkans; financial institutions and commercial practices in the Eastern Mediterranean; the history of resource industries such as minerals, lumber, and marble; international diplomacy and geopolitical relations (for example, Ottoman and Greek diplomacy in South America and East Asia during the nineteenth century); and the cultural history of Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine.

Alexis, Nikolaos

Akgöz, Görkem: “I am a labour historian currently focusing on women’s industrial labour in Turkey in a comparative perspective. In my forthcoming article ‘Between State Feminism and Work Intensification: Gendered Labor Control Regimes in Turkish Textile and Tobacco Industries’, I focus on the interactions between state discourses and workplace control in the Turkish tobacco industry in the 1930s and 1940s. My next article, ‘Metaphorical Machines: Women and Productivity in post-War Turkey’ looks at the gendered scientific management and productivity discourses in the Turkish tobacco and textile industries in the 1950s. I am also working on a comparative study of tobacco women in Turkey and Romania (together with Dr. Alexandra Ghit), comparing gender and labour discourses in the two countries in the post-War period. Last but not least, I am working with Dr. Malak Labib on a comparative study of scientific management in Turkey and Egypt, including the tobacco industries in the two countries.”

Armus, Diego: “I am working on socio-cultural history of cigarette smoking in Buenos Aires. I am concerned with the transformation of a well-accepted and celebrated habit into a medicalized practice. I deal with public health issues, corporate deception, and marketing, but also with smokers’ and non-smokers’ experiences and perceptions between the end of the nineteenth century to the present.”

Atasoy, Zehra Betül: “In my doctoral work, I reconceptualised the connection between gender and labour in early Republican Istanbul (approximately between 1930 and 1960). I examined the everyday lives of working-class women under the categories of commuting, safety, health, hierarchy, and sexual harassment in the workplace. I investigated these topics through one of the leading tobacco factories at the time – Cibali Tobacco Factory, where high numbers of women were officially employed.”

Biçer-Deveci, Elife: “My project analyses public debates about tobacco in Turkey since the 1950s, and the implications of the WHO campaigns, social emancipatory movement, and Islamic political movements on these debates. The aim of the project is to understand the role of science in reshaping gendered biases and explain how regulation policies affected gender roles.”

Carmona-Zabala, Juan: “I am interested in the history of the tobacco trade between the eastern Mediterranean and Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I approach the topic through the theoretical framework of global value chains and global production networks.”

Casanovas, Joan

Chaker, Joan: “I am interested in the political economy of tobacco cultivation, manufacture, and trade in the Ottoman Empire, with a focus on the articulation of European financial control through various means, culminating in the Société de Régie cointéressée des tabacs ottomans, as a potent and tangible illustration of the dynamics of global capitalism across the long nineteenth century.”

Cioni, Guido: Guido Cioni is a PhD candidate at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa and the University of Naples Federico II. His research focuses on the social and economic history of the early modern Mediterranean and on its broader connections through the circulation of global commodities. His interest in global tobacco history concerns trading networks, institutional governance and knowledge-based agricultural projects related to the tobacco sector in the eighteenth-century Italian peninsula. For his dissertation, he is looking into these issues from the point of view of the grand duchy of Tuscany and the Venetian Empire.

Clarence-Smith, William: William Clarence-Smith, Emeritus Professor of History, SOAS, University of London, has published on the political economy of Portuguese imperial tobacco 1825-1975. He is engaged in archival research on the Rothschilds and the nineteenth-century Philippine tobacco monopoly. From secondary sources, he is also surveying the global history of cheap cigars.

Daifoti, Katerina

Dieck, John Joseph: “I am a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota in the US. I am currently in Madrid, Spain, researching for my dissertation. I study tobacco and cannabis in protectorate Morocco. I am interseted in the legal and illegal markets, particularly the plants’ cultivators, distributors, processors, and sellers, in this period of French and Spanish colonisation. I also look at how the League of Nations and United Nations interfered in the colonial market.”

Elizalde, Lola

Eshaghi, Peyman: “My main areas of tobacco research are the social history of tobacco in its very diverse forms in the Muslim world, especially in Iran, Iraq and West Asia. I use the tobacco topic to research the political life of Muslim communities, Persian tobacco protest in particular. In addition, I am working on the idea of tobacco and tobacco use in Islamic texts and law, especially the religious verdicts (fatwas) and treatises on (not) using tobacco products.”

Fahoum, Basma: Basma Fahoum is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Stanford University. She holds an MA in culture research from Tel Aviv University. Her dissertation project examines the history of tobacco cultivation in Palestine in the late Ottoman and British Mandatory periods, as well as in Israel. Basma serves as co-editor of the Social History Workshop, a Hebrew-language public history blog published on the website of Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. She is interested in the history of capitalism and informal/illegal economic activities.

Guedeau, Nolwenn: “I am a PhD student in co-tutelle at the University of Bonn, Germany and University of Aix-Marseille, France. My research focuses on the consumption and industry of tobacco in the Ottoman Empire from an archaeological perspective. I work on key objects and resources such as pipes and narghile as well as tobacco and hashish. This is a broad-scale study from Algeria to Kurdistan, from Bosnia to Saudi Arabia, between the 17th and 19th centuries. A major focus of this research is to highlight the integration and the dependency of local communities into Ottoman economic imperialism via the material culture.”

Huetz de Lemps, Xavier

Inskip, Sarah: Dr Sarah Inskip is a bioarchaeologist at the University of Leicester, whose research focuses on understanding the relationships between health and disease with changing human behaviours through the analysis of the human skeleton. At present, she is PI of the UKRI-AHRC funded Tobacco, Health and History project, which takes an interdiscipinary approach to analysing the impact that the arrival of tobacco had on disease patterns of the English and Dutch from 1600 to 1850.

Jensz, Felicity

Kalb, Martin: Martin Kalb’s research focuses on colonial and environmental history in German Southwest Africa (1884-1915). He is currently exploring projects emerging out of his recent monograph, Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure, and the Making of German Southwest Africa (2022). One such study concentrates on the cultivation of tobacco.

Karampatsos, Christos

Krause, Thiago: “I am an assistant professor at Unirio (Brazil). I’m interested in the global circulation of Bahian tobacco, from East Asia to the North American Great Lakes – and of course Europe (especially the Western Mediterranean), as part of a global history of Salvador de Bahia (Brazil’s first capital).”

Kuncheria, CJ

Luxan Méndez, Santiago de

MacMaster, Richard K.: “My teaching and publication centred on the American Colonies before 1776, especially commerce and immigration. I am currently working on a book-length manuscript about the Chesapeake tobacco trade and the outsized role the small English port of Whitehaven had in it.”

Marktanner, Alina

Maxwell, Alexander: “I am not a tobacco historian, but in the past I did some tobacco-themed research. The context was a book project called Everyday Nationalism in Hungary. I was interested in how people express nationalism in daily life, and it turns out that Hungarians showed their patriotism, among other ways, by smoking. So the book contains a chapter on national tobacco, alongside chapters on national alcohol, national moustaches, and so forth.”

Montserrat Garate, Maria

Morgan, William: “My research concerns Cuban tobacco slavery in the nineteenth century. I am especially interested in the rise of a plantation economy in Pinar del Río, Cuba, and the effect of second slavery in this frontier region.”

Ncube, Sibanengi: “While my work on tobacco has focused on the historical development of Southern Rhodesia’s tobacco industry since the end of the Second World War, I am developing interest in understanding the politics of tobacco control in the context of a tobacco-dependent country like Zimbabwe.”

Oriaku, Chinonso Henry

Parmenter, Jon: “My interests lie with the historical use of tobacco by indigenous nations in North America (specifically in the Northeast, and particularly the Haudenosaunee) from pre-contact cultivation and trade to contemporary efforts to sell untaxed tobacco products at ‘smoke shops’ on reserved land in Canada and the United States as an economic development initiative.”

Peyrol-Kleiber, Elodie: “I work on unfree labour and more specifically on seventeenth century indentrured servitude in the American colonies and the West Indies. Within this framework I have been interested in the practices of planting, tending and picking tobacco, and I have also paid attention to the sociology surrounding those practices (master/servant relationship, tobacco as currency, tobacco and power, for example).”

Plastas, Melinda: “I teach in the Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. Here is a synopsis of my book in progress: Torn Apart: Loss, Grief, and Resilience in the Age of Commercialized Tobacco examines the complex ways that tobacco capitalism’s centuries-long harm has been rendered banal and imperceptible. It centers tobacco’s impact on our most intimate and systemic power relations.  From its fundamental role establishing North American systems of slavery and settler colonialism to the hundreds of thousands of ongoing tobacco-related deaths, commercialized tobacco has played a key role in determining whose lives get to matter. Torn Apart follows the trail of tobacco from farms to heritage museums to hospital rooms and movie theaters. It argues that the failure to recognize its enduring impact on everyday life allows tobacco capitalism to thrive. Working at the juncture of cultural studies, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, and decoloniality, this book contributes to the new histories of capitalism as well as emergent tobacco scholarship.”

Reeve, Michael: Dr Michael Reeve is a historian of modern Britain, with research interests related to the social and cultural history of war, consumption and empire. His recent work on smoking culture, tobacco consumption and provision has focused on British military and civilian contexts during the First World War, particularly the use of tobacco as a mild narcotic in situations of combat and war strain, as well as its symbolism in codes of martial masculinity and patriotism. He is currently developing a research project on the use of tobacco by military personnel and non-combatants in the context of modern war, conflict, and empire. He is Lecturer in Modern British History at the Open University, UK.

Rentetzi, Maria: Maria Rentetzi is Professor and Chair of Science, Technology and Gender Studies at Friedrich-Alexander Univeresität Erlangen-Nürnberg. She works on gender and the history of tobacco technologies in Greece as well as on the processing and circulation of tobacco as political commodity in the early twentieth century.

Rosario, Elena Marie: “I work on Puerto Rican tobacco migration and settlement in Hartford, Connecticut, during the post-Second World War era. My research interests include labour, education, urban development, social movements, and identity formation, and I explore the intersections of labour, identity, mobility and migration in the United States.”

Rösser, Michael: “I am researching the history of the Bernard Schnupftabakfarik GmbH, near the town of Regensburg (Germany). The company has existed since the eighteenth century.”

Roy, Benjamin Maurice: “My name is Ben Roy, and I am a PhD student at the University of Georgia. My research is focused on the cultural history of tobacco in the nineteenth century Northwest Europe and North America. I am intereseted in the intersections of addiction and cultural consciousness, and how certain products like pipes, cigarettes, snuff and chew, become linked to race, class, gender and ethnicity.”

Rueda Rey, Nicolás Felipe: “I work on the economic/cultural history of tobacco in Colombia during the 1930s. I wrote an MA thesis on literature about the transformation of mentalities in rural areas in Colombia because of the introduction of industrial production of tobacco. Now, in my PhD, I am exploring some of the environmental history questions grounded in the topic of tobacco.”

Sanz Rozalén, Vicente

Shechter, Relli: “I am an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. I have written extensively on tobacco consumption and production in Egypt and the Middle East, and I maintain a strong interest in comparative and global histories of tobacco.”

Silué, Gnieneferetien

Sinha-Kerkhoff, Kathinka: “I work on the colonial history of tobacco consumption in British India. I also concentrate on the link between production (including cultivation) and consumption (i.e. ‘prosumption’) and links between the global and the local (glocalisation) as well as on the material culture of tobacco.”

Mikołaj Stachera: “I am a PhD student in history at the University of Warsaw. My doctoral thesis focuses on social, economic and cultural aspects of tobacco consumption in the Second Republic of Poland between 1918 and 1939. I am interested in how tobacco consumption depended on gender, social status and regionality. In my research, I emphasize the historic habits and rituals of smokers, medicalization and marketing strategy of tobacco products. I am particularly interested in visual advertisement and tobacco product labels. My thesis compares Poland to other countries with state tobacco monopolies.”

Stubbs, Jean: Jean Stubbs is currently working on two books, one a monograph provisionally titled The Havana Cigar Universe: Transnational Migration and Commodity Production, 1756-2020, and the other a co-authored volume, informed in part by her cigar research, Nation Branding and the Post-1989 New Cuban Diasporas in Canada and Western Europe.

Tijerina, Stefano: “My project investigates how Phillip Morris used contraband as an international business strategy in order to penetrate the protected national tobacco industry of Colombia back in the 1970s and 1980s. The implementation of neoliberal policies in Colombia together with the weakening of Colombian tobacco companies, resulting from the illegal market pressures of contraband, culminated in the incremental debacle of the local industry, ultimately allowing the American company to overcome the adversities of protectionism.”

Torres Güiza, Johan Sebastian: “My main area of research is the tobacco monopoly in the Spanish Empire, with special attention on the tobacco monopoly in New Granada (present day Colombia). I’m interested in the study of the relationships of politics, economics, and social actors that participated in the cultivation, processing, distribution, and retail of tobacco between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”

Von Eichborn, Sonja: “I am part of the international tobacco control community with a background in German colonial history in Africa. I am interested in tobacco cultivation in the Global South, in the tobacco industry’s manifold strategies to further their vested interests, and in the links between human rights and tobacco control. I am looking forward to interdisciplinary discussions around tobacco.”

Wernitznig, Dagmar: “Based on a larger project, namely an ERC Advanced Grant entitled EIRENE – Post-War Transitions in Gendered Perspective: The Case of the North-Eastern Adriatic Region, my research interests deal particularly with the nexus of tobacco labour and gender throughout the short twentieth century, also regarding ramifications for our millenium and the global production of this commodity.”

Zdencanovic, Ben

Zeuske, Michael