TITLE:
Tobacco Networks in the Aegean Islands
AUTHORS:
Christos Bakalis
KEYWORDS:
Tobacco, Aegean Archipelagos, Islands, Networks, Culture, Transformation
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Historical Studies,
Vol.5 No.2,
April
14,
2016
ABSTRACT: The Aegean Archipelagos could be seen as a networked cultural space covered by multilevel web
frameworks. The lines (flows or trajectories) are routes of people, goods, ideas and the nodes are
the islands and their communities. At the same time islands are also fields of production that
makes them matrixes of social and cultural creation. This paper deals with the cultivation and
marketing of tobacco in the Aegean islands from the second half of the 19th century to the end of
the 20th century. The presence of tobacco was combined with the transition to modernity for island
communities when the capitalistic economy was spread and became dominant in the eastern
Mediterranean. Following the division of labor, the tobacco processing reinforced the dependency
of island economies from regional and global financial systems; also the establishment of an industrial
working class within island societies. The tobacco left its mark in social and spatial formation
in the Aegean islands both in urban and rural environments.