No Smoke without Fire: Tobacco and Transformation in Early Twentieth-Century Bulgaria

By the beginning of the twentieth century global changes in tobacco consumption had a significant impact on the Western Balkans.  In the United States and the UK “Oriental tobaccos” had become all the rage by the turn of the century.  Even more importantly, RJ Reynolds’ 1913 the “Camels are Coming” campaigns, introduced the new American blend cigarettes that required a percentage of Oriental-type tobacco to achieve the ultimate taste and aroma.  Oriental tobaccos, then and now, were best (and almost exclusively) grown in the sandy soils of the Western Balkans – then Ottoman, Bulgarian, and after the Balkan wars (1912-13) Greek and Serbian.  Increased Western demand for Oriental tobacco coupled with rising local tobacco consumption, facilitated the commodification of Bulgarian tobacco, which gained momentum after 1914.  During the First World War Bulgaria became the major supplier of tobacco to the Central Powers, and again production rates soared.  After the First World War, smoking rates sky-rocketed in Bulgaria as in the ‘West.”  Changes in consumption provoked a new prohibitionist literature and cultural critique of smoking as a ‘Western’ and ‘degenerate’ practice – in spite of its local roots.  At the same time, as Bulgarian tobacco was commodified in the course of this period, it also became politicized in new ways.  A new class of tobacco workers, for example, organized mass strikes against tobacco proprietors.  Tobacco, which came to be called “Bulgarian gold,” was implicated in the bloody terrorist practices that plagued Bulgarian and Serbian Macedonia.  As tobacco increased in value, it became both an asset and a part of interwar Bulgarian social and cultural predicaments.  It both empowered Bulgaria economically and created a new dependency and vulnerability in relation to Western markets.  My paper will explore these and other contradictions in the history of early twentieth century Bulgarian tobacco.