The Travels of the Holy Herb: A Global History of Bahian Tobacco, c. 1620–1763

Sugar was king in most slave societies of the Americas in the early modern era, but tobacco was not far behind: a prince, shall we say. In Bahia, whose sugar industry had to contend with fierce competition from the Caribbean, tobacco became by the 1680s one of the two pillars of the economy, as Salvador’s City Council noted in a 1687 letter to the king. It also turned out to be a mainstay of Crown revenues thanks to the royal trading monopoly. The European market (largely in the Mediterranean and Central Europe) was a crucial part of this success, but Bahian tobacco was also prized by indigenous consumers in the Great Lakes of North America, India, and China. Lisbon served as an entrepôt to these markets and the Crown aggressively tried to prevent smuggling, strengthening its presence in Salvador to this end. Market diversification and expansive merchant networks allowed Bahian tobacco to thrive despite intense competition. Even more importantly was the fact, though, that there was another commodity chain that largely escaped European control: the West African connection. Tobacco not only was produced by enslaved labor, but it was also instrumental in the acquisition of more enslaved laborers, as West African consumer preferences for Bahian tobacco required other European traders to engage with Bahian slavers. Therefore, while the Crown obsessively repressed small-scale contraband in Portugal and Salvador, it had to accept large-scale trading with Europeans in West Africa as a price to ensure the adequate supply of enslaved laborers to Brazil. In sum, this paper will show that tobacco played an integral part in the strengthening of Salvador’s merchant community and in the continued importance of the city as a major center of trade, whose reach extended beyond both the Atlantic and the Portuguese Empire.