Jean Stubbs - Böcker

Commodities provide a lens through which local and global histories can be understood and written. The study of commodity history follows these goods as they make their way from land and water through processing and trade to eventual consumption. It is a fast-developing field with collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary research, and with new information technologies becoming increasingly important. Although many individual researchers continue to focus on particular commodities and regions, they often do so in partnership with others working on different areas and employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, placing commodities history at the forefront of local and global historical analysis.This Oxford Handbook features contributions from scholars involved in these developments across a range of countries and linguistic regions. They discuss the state of the art in their fields, draw on their own work, and signal lacunae for future research. Each of the volume's thirty-one chapters focuses on an important thematic area within commodities history: essential approaches, global histories, modes of production, people and land, environmental impact, consumption, and new methodologies. The Oxford Handbook of Commodity History offers insight into the directions in which commodity history is heading, and the multiple ways in which it can contribute to a better understanding of the world.

From the forewords: "At a time when Cuba is undergoing immense economic and social changes, race becomes a kind of cultural litmus test for the national identity. . . . This anthology illustrates fully that it is possible to be both revolutionary and black in Cuba." - Manning Marable, Columbia University "The authors of Afro-Cuban Voices, also key actors in the new, unfolding dialogue about race in Cuba, make a seminal contribution through a forthright critique of 'racial blind spots' in official history and present-day racial discrimination." - James Early, director of cultural studies and communication, Smithsonian Institution From the series editor: "A courageous attempt to deal head-on with the issue of race in Cuba today. . . . PÉrez Sarduy and Stubbs [seek to] put a human face on this debate, and do so well. The book will be received with relief by some and with frustration by others. Controversial it will undoubtedly be, since - as with most things Cuban-strong emotions are a given assumption. It will be an admirable beginning for the series and, it is hoped, will spark a much-needed debate in the United States on many aspects of the 'Cuban question.' It is about time." - John M. Kirk Based on the vivid firsthand testimony of prominent Afro-Cubans who live in Cuba, this book of interviews looks at ways that race affects daily life on the island. While celebrating their racial and national identity, the collected voices express an urgent need to end the silences and distortions of history in both pre- and postrevolutionary Cuba. The 14 people interviewed - of different generations and from different geographic areas of Cuba - come from the arts, the media, industry, academia, and medicine. They include a doctor who calls for joint U.S.-Cuban studies on high blood pressure and a craftsman who makes the batÁ drums used in Yoruba worship ceremonies. All responded to four controversial questions: What is it like to be black in Cuba? How has the revolution made a difference? To what extent is that difference true today? What can be done? Exposing the contradictions of both racial stereotyping and cultural assimilation, their eloquent answers make the case that the issue of race in Cuba, no matter how hard to define, will not be ignored.

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 luxurymarkets 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 has published widely on Cuba, with a specialist interest in tobacco, class, race, gender, nation and migration. In 1985 she established her place as a pre-eminent historian of Cuban tobacco with the publication of Tobacco on the Periphery (a new expanded edition of which was published by Amaurea Press in 2023). 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, linking commodity and migration histories, drawing on sociological, anthropological and agronomic approaches, as well as archival and oral history. Now for the first time, her extensive writings have been collected into a single volume, containing 19 of her tobacco-related articles published between 1982 and 2024.

Jean Stubbs has published widely on Cuba, with a specialist interest in tobacco, class, race, gender, nation and migration. In 1985 she established her place as a pre-eminent historian of Cuban tobacco with the publication of Tobacco on the Periphery (a new expanded edition of which was published by Amaurea Press in 2023). 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, linking commodity and migration histories, drawing on sociological, anthropological and agronomic approaches, as well as archival and oral history. Now for the first time, her extensive writings have been collected into a single volume, containing 19 of her tobacco-related articles published between 1982 and 2024.