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Around the World in Three Tobaccos

Many of us live, and think, as if “nature” and “culture” were separate things, kept apart by a porous but clear boundary. In fact, it’s usually hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. (Think of the ways most of us encounter nature—we visit “forest preserves” created, and bounded, by an act of local government.)

For a farther-reaching example, you could hardly do better than to examine the history of tobacco—a plant that sometimes assumes new characteristics depending on the soil where it’s planted. Consider just one strain of this ubiquitous, lucrative crop: White Burley. The second-most-popular pipe tobacco now sold, White Burley arose solely because its ancestor, Red Burley tobacco, was just as popular and widely-used during the nineteenth-century. Cincinnati farmer George Webb found that a strange, whitish, slightly weaker-tasting strain of Red Burley was growing in his tobacco patch. He began selling it at local fairs and markets as a curiosity—like a two-headed calf at a state fair—but smokers found that they enjoyed this whitish mutant version of Red Burley more than the parent crop, leading to the widespread cultivation—and eventual dominance—of White Burley. Meanwhile, poor Red Burley went extinct because no one cultivated it anymore. You could call this “natural selection,” but it’s a clear result of cultural forces as well—the preference for a lighter, airier flavor of tobacco, good marketing, etc. Nature provides the raw material, culture adapts it, and the history of plant biology moves on.

The history of this uniquely valuable crop goes back farther than we can trace; it may have been growing in the Americas eight thousand years ago, and archaeologists have found evidence (from engravings on vases and other items) that people have smoked it for, at least, the past four millennia. But tobacco smoking reached the rest of the world as a result of late-medieval/early-modern exploration—and of colonialism. Sailors on Columbus’s expedition noticed it among indigenous natives of what would later become Cuba. Some of the finest tobacco has always, historically speaking, grown there, especially in the Pinar del R

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