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Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria

Online ISBN:
9780801465949
Print ISBN:
9780801450846
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria

Mary C. Neuburger
Mary C. Neuburger
University of Texas, Austin
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Published:
4 October 2012
Online ISBN:
9780801465949
Print ISBN:
9780801450846
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

This book leads readers along the Bulgarian–Ottoman caravan routes and into the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Sofia. It reveals how a remote country was drawn into global economic networks through tobacco production and consumption and in the process became modern. In writing the life of tobacco in Bulgaria from the late Ottoman period through the years of Communist rule, the book provides a fresh perspective on the genesis of modern Bulgaria itself. The tobacco industry comes to shape most of Bulgaria's international relations; it drew Bulgaria into its fateful alliance with Nazi Germany and in the postwar period Bulgaria was the primary supplier of smokes (the famed Bulgarian Gold) for the USSR and its satellites. By the late 1960s, Bulgaria was the number one exporter of tobacco in the world, with roughly one eighth of its population involved in production. The book visits the places where tobacco is grown to meet the merchants, the workers, and the peasant growers, most of whom are Muslim by the postwar period. Along the way, we learn how smoking and anti-smoking impulses influenced perceptions of luxury and necessity, questions of novelty, imitation, value, taste, and gender-based respectability. While the scope is often global, the book also explores the politics of tobacco within Bulgaria.

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