Tobacco on the Periphery

<p>This is the story of Cuban tobacco whose agricultural and industrial development was fashioned as deftly as a Havana cigar around overseas trading interests. It traces the nineteenth-century growth of a strong tobacco oligarchy peasant grower class and urban salaried work force alongside slave and indentured labour and examines how a prestigious manufacturing country was transformed into an exporter of leaf. Visibly poor peasant agriculture concealed foreign and home capital which while creating some large plantations used and even propagated a most extreme form of sharecropping. Well into the twentieth century an increasingly embattled industry catered to dwindling luxury markets and an unstable fluctuating home market with but a few relatively large on the whole family concerns and a proliferation of small sweatshop and outwork production.</p><p><br></p><p>Jean Stubbs penetrates the finer socio-political aspects of the radically changing nature and composition of peasantry and proletariat including the interlacing of race gender and skill to take a closer look at areas of class action and national and class consciousness be it through reformism anarcho-syndicalism revolutionary nationalism socialism or communism.</p><p><br></p><p>This new edition expands on the 1985 original with a new Foreword and Preface and other source material.</p>