UCLA

This dissertation is an analysis of the tobacco industry in the late Ottoman Empire and in the post-Ottoman Aegean Region. In particular, it traces the development of the political economy of tobacco in Macedonia, Thrace, and the surrounding region, which incorporated tobacco producers and merchants into trans-regional commercial networks and global financial flows. The most prominent merchants of the late Ottoman period were all involved in ongoing processes of urbanization, financialization, and industrialization in the region. These processes created political-economy dynamics that provided opportunities for some commercial actors while limiting the potential for social advancement amongst others. In response, social actors often engaged in subterfuge and smuggling while they became enmeshed in cycles of violence and warlordism in the countryside. Illegal commerce and banditry became commonplace. Ultimately, the potential opportunities provided by the tobacco trade transformed the tobacco-producing lands of Macedonia and Thrace into the core of competing national economy projects of the Committee for Union and Progress, the Bulgarian government under Tsar Ferdinand I, and the Greek government after World War I under the auspices of the League of Nations plan to exchange the populations of Greece and Turkey. In this way, while this dissertation primarily analyzes the “tobacco question” in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Aegean Region, it also attempts to demonstrate the ways that tobacco played into the broader “eastern question” and the multiple crises (i.e. sectarian violence and competition between national economy projects) affecting the southern Balkans in the early twentieth century.