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EDITOR’S NOTE: Points is delighted to welcome Mary Neuburger, a Professor of History; Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies; and Director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Below, Neuburger discusses her recent book, Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Cornell, 2012), which chronicles the politics of tobacco production and consumption in Bulgaria from the late Ottoman period through the years of Communist rule. 

Describe your book in terms your bartender could understand.

Balkan Smoke is a cultural and social history of tobacco in Bulgaria, with focus on the modern period, roughly 1863-1989. It traces the long and transformative process of the introduction and then expansion of largely “Oriental” tobacco production and exchange in this region, in tune with the rise of a global addiction to tobacco. Like most commodity histories, it is a story that inevitably crosses borders, elaborating on the roles of the most critical global and regional players like the Ottoman Empire—from which Bulgaria became autonomous in 1878 and independent in 1908—as well as the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union.  The tracing of this process is coupled with a history of smoking (and anti-smoking) culture in Bulgaria, again in the context of global shifts in smoking practices. The books looks at the rise of and changes in patterns (particularly of public) smoking in Bulgaria, but also at the varied (though largely unsuccessful) sources of resistance to tobacco on health, social, and moral grounds.  All of these processes take quite different forms in late Ottoman and early post-Ottoman Bulgaria, in times of war, particularly World War II when Bulgaria was aligned with Nazi Germany, and then, perhaps most dramatically under communism. It is this part of the story that is perhaps the most revealing, as the Bulgarian communist tobacco monopoly, with its gargantuan Soviet market, became the top exporter of cigarettes in the world by the mid-1960s. It was attuned to consumers, and willing and able to adopt technologies and aesthetics wholesale from the West, all in the name of “building socialism.” Given the central role of this industry in the Bulgarian economy, state-driven anti-tobacco campaigns, which peaked in the mid-1970s, were always half-hearted and doomed for failure.

What do you think a bunch of alcohol and drug historians might find particularly interesting about your book?

Historians of alcohol and drugs undoubtedly share my fascination with historical changes in the acceptability of intoxicants in various contexts. Bulgaria presents a fascinating case because of its place on the “periphery” of Europe, with a complex set of outside influences that shaped its encounter with tobacco. Tobacco was introduced from the New World into the Ottoman Empire in the 17^th century, where the plant adapted to the local climatic and soil conditions growing on small mountain plots (as opposed to plantation lowlands as in the US). Its properties altered into various “Turkish” or “Oriental” varieties that were more flavorful, had less nicotine, and eventually became were sought after in Western markets. This was particularly true after the success of the famous Camel brand released by R.J. Reynolds in 1913, and the eventual dominance of the market of American (and European) “blends”. In the Ottoman Empire, smoking was historically a Muslim habit, an accompaniment to coffee, consumed in hookahs and pipes in the largely Muslim coffeehouse—an institution (and beverage) that spread West in the early modern period. By the late nineteenth century, however, Ottoman Christians, including Bulgarians, were becoming smokers and tobacco consumption expanded rapidly in the twentieth century, tied to Bulgaria’s Europeanization following its gaining of autonomy in 1878, to the World Wars and the Cold War.  The local coffeehouse was replaced by the gleaming European-style café, and ties to European, American, and Russian markets played a role in the expanding Bulgarian tobacco economy.  This is just a taste for the kinds of details the books engages, putting the story of the rise of a dominant tobacco economy in Bulgaria into a complicated regional and global context.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Points is delighted to welcome Chris S. Duvall, an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of New Mexico and the author of Cannabis (University of Chicago, 2015).

  Describe your book in terms your bartender could understand.

It’s a world history of the plant genus Cannabis, which is the most widespread crop.  The events that enabled cannabis to colonize the world from its evolutionary origins in Central Asia include many of humanity’s most notable migrations.  Nowadays, people mostly think of ‘cannabis’ as meaning ‘marijuana’, but the plant has meant many things to many people.  It has been bred to produce fiber, oilseeds, and drugs.  In the West, cannabis was most valuable historically as the source of hemp, used to make ropes and sailcloth during the Age of Sail.  Its value sank to almost nothing by the early 1900s, when sails no longer powered commercial shipping.  When Europeans first encountered drug cannabis in Asia and Africa in the 1500s, they saw this as an unfamiliar, wasteful use of a familiar, valuable plant.  Unfortunately, this perception resonated with European colonialist views of the world, and cannabis drug use entered negative stereotypes about non-Europeans—even though Europeans have used the drug since they first encountered it.  Layered upon these stereotypes was the reality that most cannabis drug users were members of low labor classes.  For centuries this use was tolerated, but in the early 1900s, authorities increasingly saw drug cannabis as a problem.  Since hemp had lost nearly all value, cannabis drug control laws had minimal economic consequences to 20th-century authorities.  The laws that emerged were biased against the poor and people of color, and current drug-law enforcement maintains these biases.  The history I tell in the book challenges widespread ideas about the plant’s past, because most cannabis world histories have been light on research and heavy on political advocacy for or against prohibition.

 What do you think a bunch of alcohol and drug historians might find particularly interesting about your book?

I think perhaps that it provides an account of the plant’s cosmopolitan distribution based on physical geography, plant biology, linguistics, sociology, pharmacology, science studies, and history.  I’m a geographer, so my approach is different from many historians.  My strongest influences in writing the book were post-colonial scholars like Judith Carney, Londa Schiebinger, and James Blaut, alongside drugs historians like James Mills, Isaac Campos, and David Courtwright.  My past research has focused on understanding people–plant interactions from multiple disciplinary perspectives, not just drug plants in history.  I think my interdisciplinary approach helps bring new ideas into the discussions of drug historians.

So what new ideas might the book bring?  Three come to mind.  First, there has been really important research in plant genetics recently that clarifies the evolutionary history of cannabis.  This work shows that there are two cryptic species that people were unable to differentiate except through drug use until the 1960s.  Recognizing the genetic basis of psychoactivity and the plant’s evolutionary geography is helpful for understanding why cannabis drug use has often signified cultural difference, not plant diversity, in Western thought.  Second, in African Studies several works in the past two decades have shown that societies around the Atlantic bear clear cultural inheritances from Africa, despite past, Eurocentric historiography.  I argue that many cannabis drug cultures around the Atlantic are fundamentally African in terms of language and technology (that is, paraphernalia—the bong is a pre-Columbian African invention).  This is the topic on which I continue to do research.  Third, and really important in considering marijuana’s African past, is the book’s emphasis on social context, not cultural heritage, in determining drug use.  African cannabis knowledge is widespread because the plant entered the Atlantic primarily through western Central Africa, and because African-descent peoples have demographically dominated labor underclasses for centuries as a consequence of slavery, colonialism, and racism.  Nonetheless, poor, hard laborers from all continents—slaves, sailors, sex workers, low-ranking soldiers, prisoners—have been the drug’s main users for centuries.  World histories of cannabis have tended to mask this because they have dwelled upon more charismatic episodes—ancient religious uses in South Asia, 19th-century European pharmacology, and the marijuana boom amongst middle-class people in the Global North since the 1960s.

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