TOBACCO: A HISTORY OF CAPITALISM FROM AMERICA TO CIBALI

Course Objectives: The course aims to introduce students to the historical trajectories of global capitalism through the lens of an everyday commodity, tobacco. From its cultivation to its distribution, production, and consumption, the history of this commodity offers an ideal space to study the global history of capitalism, tracing the transformation of capitalism from the early modern period to the modern era and highlighting the diverse actors and their agencies that played pivotal roles in this process. The course will also help students gain a critical understanding of Ottoman and Republican history by demonstrating to them how the history of a commodity could reveal the diversity of actors, perspectives, and experiences, as well as the complexity of historical trajectories in imperial/national histories. A third, and equally important goal of the course is to familiarize students with the history of the Cibali Tobacco Factory, understanding it not merely a building (or a block) but more so as a nodal point of wider networks of production, distribution, and consumption, and one that continues to be so in its present status. In this way, it also aims to strengthen their spatial engagement with the campus and neighbourhoods that surround it.

Course Content: The course will have three modules: In the first one, we’ll explore the global history of tobacco, tapping into the history of explorations, plantations and slavery, industrial transformations, and consumption patterns. In the second module, we’ll investigate tobacco’s trajectories in the Ottoman Empire, from the trade networks that introduced it to the attempts to ban it, its place in the Ottoman people’s everyday life, and its representations in Ottoman/Turkish art and literature. In the final module, we’ll focus on the history of the Cibali Tobacco Factory, its workers, and the Golden Horn neighbourhoods around it, in the context of major socio-economic and political processes in the late Ottoman and Republican Turkish histories. Students, throughout the course, will engage with multiple sources, ranging from diaries and memoirs to posters, documents, and museum materials located in the RHM.