As I mentioned in a previous post, we recently returned from a Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) conference in St. Lucia, where we attended the CSA Author Celebration. One of the books presented at the conference was the second edition of the renowned Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860-1958 (Amaurea Press, June 2023) by Jean Stubbs. The book was introduced by Anton Allahar. This new edition expands on the 1985 original with a new Foreword and Preface, and other source material.

Description: This is the story of Cuban tobacco, whose agricultural and industrial development was fashioned as deftly as a Havana cigar around overseas trading interests. It traces the nineteenth-century growth of a strong tobacco oligarchy, peasant grower class and urban salaried work force, alongside slave and indentured labour, and examines how a prestigious manufacturing country was transformed into an exporter of leaf. Visibly poor peasant agriculture concealed foreign and home capital which, while creating some large plantations, used and even propagated a most extreme form of sharecropping. Well into the twentieth century, an increasingly embattled industry catered to dwindling luxury markets and an unstable, fluctuating home market with but a few relatively large, on the whole family, concerns and a proliferation of small sweatshop and outwork production.

Jean Stubbs penetrates the finer socio-political aspects of the radically changing nature and composition of peasantry and proletariat, including the interlacing of race, gender and skill, to take a closer look at areas of class action and national and class consciousness, be it through reformism, anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary nationalism, socialism or communism.

Jean Stubbs first went to Cuba in 1968 to conduct research. She married there, had two children, and lived and worked in Havana until 1987. Now based in London, she has published widely on Cuba, with a specialist interest in tobacco, class, race, gender, nation and migration. Her foundational work on Cuban tobacco, and especially the Havana cigar, led her to trace cultivation, trade, manufacture, labour and consumption on a regional and global scale, drawing on sociological, anthropological and agronomic approaches, as well as archival and oral history. Professor Emerita of London Metropolitan University, she is an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (University of London) and the Institute of the Americas (University College London). In 2009, she was awarded the UNESCO Toussaint Louverture Medal, and in 2012 was elected member of the Cuban Academy of History.

She has published widely on Cuba, her specialist interests spanning tobacco, labour, gender, race and migration. She is currently co-editing the Oxford University Press Handbook of Commodity History (with Prof. William Gervase Clarence-Smith, SOAS; Dr Jonathan Curry-Machado, ILAS, University of London; and Dr Jelmer Vos, University of Glasgow). She is also working on two other books, one provisionally titled The Havana Cigar Universe: Transnational Migration and Commodity Production, 1756-2020 (single-authored) and the other, Nation-Branding and the New Cuban Diasporas in Canada and Western Europe, 1989-2019 (co-authored with Dr Catherine Krull, University of Victoria, Canada).

Her foundational work on Cuban tobacco, and especially the Havana cigar, has led her to trace cultivation, trade, manufacture, labour and consumption on a global scale, linking commodity and migration histories. Spanning the late-eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, her work draws on sociological, anthropological and agronomic approaches, as well as archival and oral history. Her work on contemporary Cuban migration builds on this to explore how commodity and nation-branding have shaped the new Cuban diasporic mobilities. Her more recent interest in commodity frontiers and environmental history led her to co-produce the documentary Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes (2019, dir. Michael Chanan, co-producer Jonathan Curry-Machado), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

For more on the author, see https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk/about/jean-stubbs/, https://www.caribbeanstudiesassociation.org/presidents-archive/jean-stubbs/, and https://www.afrocubaweb.com/jeanstubbs.htm  

For more information on the book, see https://www.amaureapress.com/titles/tobacco-on-the-periphery/