Mary C. Neuburger. Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria.

Abstract

After laying down Balkan Smoke, this lifelong non-smoker longed for a cigarette from a Bulgartabak packet. Mary C. Neuburger's brilliant new book recounts the social life of tobacco in the past two centuries. In her hands tobacco becomes a surprisingly transparent and focused lens reaching through the dense smoke at the contours of Bulgaria's political, economic, social, and cultural history. From the sixteenth century, the Ottoman coffee-house had been a locus of male sociability for Muslims, but in the nineteenth century it also became a meeting ground for Christians and Jews. The Bulgarian kafene (coffee-house) and kruchma (tavern), both filled with smoke, were places of leisure and idleness as well as hotbeds of political agitation and intellectual ferment. By the end of the century, despite the general economic crisis and the fall of grain and cotton prices, the global tobacco addiction stimulated the expansion of tobacco cultivation, processing, and commerce both in the Ottoman Empire and the autonomous Bulgarian principality. Until the Balkan wars, Bulgaria's growing production was satisfying primarily local needs and following the traditional Ottoman trade routes. The Balkan wars and especially World War I revolutionized tobacco production and consumption. Not only did Bulgaria's tobacco industry expand meteorically, it reoriented itself decisively toward Austria and Germany, forging new networks of foreign dependency.