Balkan Smoke

In writing the life of tobacco in Bulgaria from the late Ottoman period through the years of Communist rule, Neuburger gives us much more than the cultural history of a commodity; she provides a fresh perspective on the genesis of modern Bulgaria itself.

Mary C. Neuburger is Director of the Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies, Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, and Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria, also from Cornell.

This smart, scrupulous, and elegant volume shows just how much interpretative power and creative reach a carefully executed commodity history can have. Balkan Smoke takes up the story of tobacco in a society that, like no other, has been shaped by the plant's production, distribution, consumption, and incorporation into mass and high culture.... Balkan Smoke is a thoughtful, innovative work of history writing and, in many ways, a valuable, fresh, and highly original contribution not just to national and regional historiography but to European history and economic history more generally, and to the expanding field of commodity studies.

This fascinating book explores the history of tobacco and tobacco culture in Bulgaria from the mid-19th century, when the country became partially and then fully independent from the Ottoman Empire, to the postcommunist present. Neuburger... argues convincingly that smoking and the production of tobacco products played an important—if not the key—part in Bulgaria's political, economic; and cultural modernization during this period.... Summing Up: Highly recommended.

One of the strongest contributions of Balkan Smoke is Neuburger's method. She uses tobacco and smoking as a lens through which to rethink the parameters of Bulgarianhistory. In doing so, she argues that tobacco production and consumption spurred deep transformations and brought a modern condition to Bulgaria's tobacco-growing regions.... Tobacco runs through each topic and it is evident that they are all tied to the others in both obvious and hidden ways. And this is precisely where Balkan Smoke shines.

Neuburger's work sharpens our understandings of Bulgarian economic history.... It is dense stuff, and I am terribly impressed with Neuburger’s ability to bring it all together in a coherent narrative. She has added a new thread to our understanding of the development of modern nationalism.

Mary C. Neuburger's brilliant new book recounts the social life of tobacco in the past two centuries.... It creatively utilizes the extensive Bulgarian literature on the tobacco industry and cultural works on everyday life to produce a highly original account of the making of Bulgarian modernity.... [A] remarkably well-researched and inspiringly written work.

In Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria, Neuburger masterfully demonstrates how the yellow-leafed plant has been at the core of building the historical narrative of modern day Bulgaria. More importantly, it also reveals in a particularly poignant way the complex dynamics of national consumption and global flows of goods and the ideologies they encapsulate.... Neuburger has a keen eye both for factual details and for cultural minutia, which reveals her remarkable ease and extreme, almost native-like, level of comfort and familiarity with the often hidden nuances of Bulgaria's less obvious cultural references.

Balkan Smoke places Mary Neuburger squarely at the forefront of the burgeoning field of consumption, commodities, and material culture studies about East-Central Europe.... Neuburger adeptly ties together numerous strands of culture, economics, politics, and ideas into a coherent narrative of the ever-changing and competing expressions of "Bulgaria.'

Alison Frank, Harvard University, author of Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia:

With Balkan Smoke, Mary C. Neuburger has established herself as a trailblazer in twentieth-century Eastern European history. She effectively exploits the history of one commodity, in this case tobacco, to illuminate a wide range of interconnected economic, cultural, and social transformations in communist Bulgaria. Using tobacco, Neuburger rethinks the functioning of communist economies and the potential for entrepreneurial creativity within them, the tension between economic motives and public health motives in defining a state's attempts to influence the behavior of its citizens, and the connections between southeastern Europe and the European/global economy.

C. Wendy Bracewell, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, author of The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry, and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adriatic:

Mary C. Neuburger's use of tobacco as a device to examine issues in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bulgarian history brilliantly links topics that are rarely considered together: Eurocentrism, Protestant missionaries, the Modern Girl, irredentism, terrorist finances, party politics, and the fate of the Jews. Paradoxically, seeing these issues against a haze of tobacco smoke makes them stand out all the more clearly.

Nancy M. Wingfield, Northern Illinois University, author of Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech:

Mary C. Neuburger's fascinating account of the 'social life' of tobacco in Bulgaria analyzes both local and transnational trends in smoking from the long nineteenth century to the present. Evocative and elegantly written, this book traces the economic, political, and social Europeanization of Bulgaria and the Balkans through tobacco, from Ottoman Muslim coffeehouse culture to twenty-first-century practices of sociability. Neuberger locates the commodification of tobacco—'Bulgarian Gold'— in the dynamic and multifaceted environment of East-West encounters, commercial exchange, and urban cosmopolitan leisure practices in modernizing Bulgaria. This highly original book should attract a broad audience.

Maureen Healy, Lewis & Clark College, author of Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I:

Mary C. Neuburger, already a preeminent scholar of the history of commodities, here examines the dogged Bulgarian attachment to the cigarette, past and present. She crafts a fascinating story that ranges from the biological effects of a puff to the workings of the global tobacco industry. Along the way she offers a compelling analysis of leisure, sociability, state transformation and individual agency in the twentieth century. This is a marvelously inventive, one-of-a-kind work from an enormously talented historian.

Robert Nemes, Colgate University, author of The Once and Future Budapest:

Balkan Smoke tells the remarkable story of Bulgarian tobacco over the past 150 years. It takes us into coffeehouses and tobacco fields; it follows the trade routes that linked Bulgaria to Istanbul, Berlin, Moscow, and North Carolina. Tobacco, Mary C. Neuburger argues, drove Bulgarian culture, diplomacy, and trade. But tobacco also brought anxiety, instability, and violence in its train. Balkan Smoke thus offers a highly original and very compelling account of modern Bulgaria.