Big Tobacco: an 18th Century Concept

           At no point in our lives has tobacco not been big business.  It was always a given for anyone in my generation or even my parent’s generation that tobacco was manufactured and sold by massive corporations.  Furthermore, we think of it just like that, as manufacturing, when in reality tobacco products start existence from agriculture.  Big tobacco business is not a product of the 20^th Century, however.  It is in fact a product of the very early 18^th Century.

             In a 2011 article entitled “The Visible Fist: The Chesapeake Tobacco Trade in War and the Purpose of Empire, 1690-1715” Douglas Bradburn examines the very time and place when tobacco production became accessible only to major traders with state (British) sponsorship.  In the article, which has made quite a few waves in the field of Colonial American history, Bradburn describes the process by which Chesapeake tobacco market—a drug trade by another name—came under control of the British government and a few select tobacco firms.  Until the late 1690s the tobacco trade was largely an open market.  Anyone could buy tobacco in the Chesapeake, import it to Britain, and resell it for a profit.  However, during the two decades that followed Britain became engaged in a series of wars with France during which the tobacco fleets required direct protection from the British navy.  By 1700, the Royal Navy had stationed 85 warships—16,000 sailors—in the Chesapeake Bay just to protect the tobacco plantations and form guarded merchant convoys for the shipment of tobacco to England.  Facilitating this process was a Board of Trade that gained power over how much tobacco could being imported and which firms would be given the right to do so.  Within 20 years these policies served to concentrate the entire tobacco trade into the hands of only a few merchant firms.

             Early America is thus the story of both government sponsored drug trafficking and big tobacco companies.  Sometimes, little changes no matter how many years go by.

Bradburn, Douglas. “The Visible Fist: The Chesapeake Tobacco Trade in War and the Purpose of Empire, 1690-1715.” The William and Mary Quarterly 68.3 (2011): 361-386. JSTOR. 16 June 2013.