TOBACCO FARMING: DISCOURSES ABOUT COLONIAL EXPECTATIONS, PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES AND MARKET PREFERENCES

• Grant number: 25/00369-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: June 01, 2025
• End date: November 27, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - Modern and Contemporary History
• Principal Investigator: Ana Carolina de Carvalho Viotti
• Grantee: Rodrigo Canossa Barbosa
• Supervisor: Richard Drayton
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCHS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Franca. Franca , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: King's College London, England
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/17991-1 - Beyond nicotine: tobacco s sensory on farming and curing practices, amongst Virginia and England (17th Century), BP.MS

Abstract

By the second half of the 16th century, especially after Elizabeth I's ascension to the English throne, privateering and overseas expansion increased in the country. Besides this expansion, England became capable of canvassing and accessing commodities once restricted or mediated by the Iberian nations, and tobacco would soon be one of the most important commodities, rapidly crossing the Atlantic and rushing from the port cities to the whole country. Thus, colonial interests rose beyond the Caribbean borders, such as the failed 1585 Roanoke colony in Virginia. With the ascension of the Stuart dynasty, even though maintaining a similar Elizabethan foreign policy, open conflicts with Spain were avoided, including commercial ventures over the Caribbean and the Southern Atlantic that could cause dissension. Hence the Virginia Company greatly benefited from this foreign policy and since 1607 would search for a profitable commodity to grow in the Virginian soils, with tobacco being amongst them soon it would find a highly competitive and demanding market in England, a country already used to the strong rope tobacco coming from the Spanish West Indies. By a meticulous analysis of the proposed documentation about Virginia's first years this project aims to understand the role the colony played as one of the many Atlantic regions supplying tobacco to England and how we can gather more knowledge on this issue by also discerning farming knowledge and expectations for the colony's future, understanding it as part of a wider Atlantic context marked by previous English experiences on the Caribbean and the Southern Atlantic, as a byproduct of this wider approach we shall be able to determine tobacco farming techniques for planting and curing in order to understand the effects it might have caused on the final product, regarding quality control and knowledge transfer of tobacco cultivation. With both of these categories at hand, we aspire to enrich and broaden the horizons of the possibilities of Atlantic and Global History fields.