Balkan Smoke

Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria

Mary C. Neuburger (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

320 Seiten

2016
Cornell University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5017-0572-4 (ISBN)

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This fascinating book explores the history of tobacco and tobacco culture in Bulgaria from the mid-19th century, when the country became partially and then fully independent from the Ottoman Empire, to the postcommunist present. Neuburger... argues convincingly that smoking and the production of tobacco products played an importantâ•if not the keyâ•part in Bulgaria's political, economic; and cultural modernization during this period.... Summing Up: Highly recommended. >â• Choice

In Balkan Smoke, Mary C. Neuburger leads readers along the Bulgarian-Ottoman caravan routes and into the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Sofia. She 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, Neuburger gives us much more than the cultural history of a commodity; she provides a fresh perspective on the genesis of modern Bulgaria itself. The tobacco trade 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.

Through the pages of this book we visit the places where tobacco is grown and 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, Neuburger also explores the politics of tobacco within Bulgaria. Among the book’s surprises are the ways in which conflicts over the tobacco industry (and smoking) help to clarify the forbidding quagmire of Bulgarian politics.

Mary C. Neuburger is Director of the Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies, Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, and Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria, also from Cornell.

Introduction1. Coffeehouse Babble: Smoking and Sociability in the Long Nineteenth Century2. No Smoke without Fire: Tobacco and Transformation, 1878–19143. From the Orient Express to the Sofia Café: Smoke and Propriety in the Interwar Years4. The Tobacco Fortress: Asenovgrad Krepost and the Politics of Tobacco between the World Wars5. From Leaf to Ash: Jews, Germans, and Bulgarian Gold in the Second World War6. Smoke-Filled Rooms: Places to Light Up in Communist Bulgaria7. Smokes for Big Brother: Bulgartabak and Tobacco under CommunismConclusionNotes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	13.10.2016
Zusatzinfo	15 halftones, 1 map - 15 Halftones, black and white
Verlagsort	Ithaca
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	907 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	1-5017-0572-5 / 1501705725
ISBN-13	978-1-5017-0572-4 / 9781501705724
Zustand	Neuware